A very warm day in the middle of a heat wave. I spend much of the day working on my book in a borrowed room, and at the end of the afternoon I go to the Atlas Cafe in the Mission District to have a cappucino and make a few notes.

As I circle to find a parking place, which is difficult in the Mission even on a Saturday afternoon, I notice an unmarked police car with a plainclothes driver keeping an eagle eye out for something. And a couple minutes later I see three cop cars come roaring up the street. They turn the corner by the cafe.

When I reach its front door I see the cops have detained two Latino teenagers dressed in the baggy, neutral uniform of the neighborhood: white t-shirts and black shorts. There are now five cop cars for these two kids, whom I had idly noticed walking quietly along a block away when I was looking for parking.

Inside the cafe, most of the tables are occupied with people studying or working on laptops. A young woman and young man are playing guitars — mostly ragtime and songs from the 1920s. They play a few choruses and then the woman sings one of those old songs in a clear tenor voice. (Their names, I found out when I looked at the CD they had for sale, are Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod, and here’s a YoutTube video of them performing at the Atlas earlier this year.)

The cops let the two kids go and the police cars drive away. Almost no one in the cafe noticed the roust taking place across the street.

After several songs, the woman’s place is taken by a young man, who plays instrumentals while the woman passes a hat. Then a couple in their thirties — the man in a straw fedora, a woman in a sundress — stand up and begin to dance the tango. The guitarists are still playing ragtime but the dancers are good enough to do the tango to ragtime anyway.

Either the bandits who are terrorizing East Bay restaurants finally scraped together bridge fare, or the fad has spread to the West Bay: This morning three men in hoodies robbed a Denny’s in Daly City, taking the contents of the cash register while making everybody lie on the floor.

Being robbed at gunpoint — that’s a good story to tell around the water cooler. But being made to lie on the floor at a Denny’s: yuck.

They got “a very small amount of money,” say the cops, but I have the feeling they just don’t want to encourage them. If they said they got $3000* then you’d have even more robberies. View a Google map of all the restaurant takeover-style holdups this summer.

* A figure I just made up, and not intended to be taken as the actual amount of money stolen.

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.

High up on the list of things I can’t enough of locally are the Panhandle, bikes, and bartering. Enter the Panhandle Bike Swap and Summer Party on the afternoon of August 17, a date at which it may just be starting to feel like summer in other parts of the state.

According to a local fixed gear aficionado/friend, “There’s talk of a ‘bike Olympics’ competition that would potentially include bike polo, Goldsprints (racing on rollers) and a bike toss (as in, how far you can throw an already wrecked frame). No confirmation on this yet.”

Participants are encouraged to bring bike parts for Cycles of Change, an East Bay program that provides cycling and nutrition education to urban youth. The organization offers a summer touring program that takes young students on bike trips around California after teaching them about safe urban riding. Sounds like something we could all use.

Being one of those crazy bike riders (of the fixed gear variety) I was pretty damn psyched to hear about the new Chrome store in SoMa. (yes I know you If you used to be able to swing by their warehouse and buy stuff before but this is like a store store for real and shit) If haven’t heard about it yet that’s because when I say new, I mean BRAND NEW - as in the grand opening is next week! We stopped by yesterday but unfortunately too late and they were already closed, hopefully today we’ll be more lucky. I’m only in town for a few days so I’m going to miss it, but for people who live here and ride bikes, or who live here and enjoy awesomely designed bags I highly recommend blocking off some time next Thursday (July 31) and swinging by the new store at 4th and Brannan and partaking in the festivities.

Two of my favorite things are set to convene this Wednesday: Ritual Roasters and Bikes to Rwanda, a non-profit that unites American roasters to improve the quality of life for Rwandan coffee farmers. A ping-pong tournament is set for July 9th at 5 PM at 1026 Valencia to help build five bike shops. Read: the $25 you could spend this week on big brand coffee could provide a co-op farmer with a bike toolset, including tire lever, frame pump, and wrench.

I’m a big fan of Clara Seasholtz, the founder of the organization that raises money for a low-cost bicycles that farmers use to transport supplies and 130-pound bags of beans. Seasholtz helped the group provide more than 250 bikes to farmers last year and is currently focusing on opening bike shops in Rwanda to teach communities how to care for and build bikes. She’s on a Northern California trip this week, and I admire her unique approach to using what she knows (the American coffee industry) to impact what she saw as problematic (Rwandan farmers lacking transportation to increase their marketability). Now that deserves some table tennis.

With a shoulder that feels ripped apart courtesy of Chrome (that sounds very Valencia Corridor-esque), I’ve been looking for something to carry my items around SF in that won’t require Ibuprofin. That’s right: a backpack. No more shoulder bags; this time around, it’s an off-to-third grade two strap style. I noticed a heavy duty one from Freight Baggage at Freewheel, but the white would last about a week before I tried to leave for work with coffee before getting caught off guard by a stop sign.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time yesterday afternoon trying to track down Freight Baggage’s creator, Travis Poh. An online search for freightbaggage.com turned up one of those pages with a photo of a random lady and an offer to buy the URL. Uninterested in freight shipping quotes as well, I started asking strangers and messengers. “Oh yea,” one told me. “Travis. You can find him on Vallejo toward North Beach. By that cafe. Tell him Frank sent you.”

My fault for not getting enough information (or maybe the fact that it sounded a bit too much like a drug transaction). A Freight Baggage MySpace page says Mr. Poh is 100 years old–no big shock there. I was also told that he’s elusive and overworked. I could order one through a bike shop but it could take more than a month to arrive. Is it so wrong to want to end my search and find the maker in our seven-by-seven mile city?

All I want is a backpack, preferably in primary colors and within the range of my tax refund check. It doesn’t have to be big enough for me to fit in. You can stick that logo with a train car anywhere you want on it. But please, let’s end the search.

In an effort to keep church and state separate I give you the Ten Commandments of SF!

1. Thou shalt always vote on principal and not political party
2. Thou shall move your family to the suburbs when your children are of school age
3. Thou shalt always have an earthquake preparedness kit in your home
4. Thou shalt drive a hybrid car
5. Thou shalt always yield to a bike if driving, and a ped if driving/biking
6. Thou shalt not pay for muni
7. Thou shall hate the dodgers like the devil himself/herself. Unless of course you are a satanist. Then thou shall hate the dodgers like god himself/herself
8. Thou shalt be tolerant, to the point of absurdity
9. Thou shalt pickup after your pooch, homeless denizen, drunk buddy defecates
10. Thou shalt keep your winter clothes out of storage all summer long

See things differently? Let’s hear your commandments in the comments!

h/t to David at the LA Metblog.

I’m betting anything that this is already underway, but if you are interested, may as well let your voice be heard on the matter.

Sign the petition!

To: Google, and the Google Maps team
We would like a ‘Bike There’ feature added to Google Maps - to go with the current ‘Drive There’ and ‘Take Public Transit’ options. The feature would take into account actual bicycle lanes from the locality being mapped, and it would automatically plan a route for a bicyclist, possibly even providing the cyclist options for either the most direct route, or the most bicycle-friendly (safest) route. The Google Maps-based third party site, byCycle.org (http://byCycle.org/), provides these features for two metro areas - Portland, Oregon and Madison, Wisconsin, and there are countless other mapping initiatives around the world aimed at accomplishing the same goal. We hope that Google will consider building this feature into the core Google Maps service.

There are many reasons why this feature would be a wonderful edition to Google Maps. Among them, some of the most influential would be to:
* Make bicycling safer for millions of bicyclists around the world.
* Empower world citizens to better adapt their lifestyles to face the challenges of global climate change.
* Help Google realize its core mission of ‘organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.’

By implementing the ‘Take Public Transit’ option, Google and the Google Maps team have shown themselves to be concerned and capable world citizens; a ‘Bike There’ feature addition to Google Maps would be the ultimate statement in support of sustainable development.

For more information on this feature request please visit the Google Maps ‘Bike There’ website (http://GoogleMapsBikeThere.org/).

Thank you, Google and the Google Maps team! And thank you, petitioners, for joining us in attempting to realize this very important goal!
Sincerely,

The Undersigned