Wired magazine has a hilarious and fascinating piece on training for space tourists, those wealthy former businessmen who cashed out companies and thus have $30 million to blow on a year in training and a week in space on the shuttle. (One of the men profiled in the piece — and they’re always men — refers to himself using the ghastly neologism “thrillionaire.”) As a Russian press liaison says about the attitude toward these dilletantes: “People say it is better to send monkey.”

Then there’s the old-fashioned way: earn it. Not the money, but the job. Meet Megan McArthur, Ph.D. (pictured at right), who went to high school in Mountain View and whose parents live in San Jose. McArthur will be blasting off in October to operate the Big Robot Arm — I’m sure it has a less colorful NASA-like acronym — on a mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope.

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During the 1960s, professional wrestling was huge at the Cow Palace. There are vast websites devoted to the phenomenon, which was part of a circuit that included Sacramento.

Now a new book, When I Shot Good & Bad Guys Who Wrestled at the Cow Palace, commemorates the era. The book collects photographer Jim Fitzpatrick’s work documenting the bouts held by promoter Roy Shire, a former wrestler who became the biggest wrestling promoter in Northern California in the 1960s (scroll down in that page to “The Beginning” for Shire’s story).

You can order When I Shot Good and Bad Guys here.

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[Images above by the artists named below, respectively, from left to right. Montage by 111 Minna.]

The group show Common Descent, currently on view at 111 Minna, is set to close August 31st, so there’s only a short time left to check it out before it comes down for good. The four artists involved — Brett Amory, Seth Armstrong, Andrew Hem, and John Wentz (no website available) — have never shown at the gallery before, but each is an emerging talent with a strong body of work, and some really nice pieces in the show are still available, if you’re into collecting. All the artists but one are based in the Bay Area — but don’t let local pride put you off of Andrew Hem’s whimsically weird work, which I’m particularly fond of — all those distorted figures and faces set against such soothing pastels make for a viewing experience that’s simultaneously comforting and unsettling. Always a winning combination for me!

Plus, 111 Minna is a nice place to go for a drink after work, as Metblogger Anthony Riva pointed out here a few months ago.

[via Juxtapoz.]

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Chatting with XOX owner Jean-Marc Gorce about how all of the local shops are either closing up or feeling a serious pinch - he laid off 3 workers- because of a rash of ADA suits against them for non-compliance. Written up in June in the Chron, and covered on CBS (though not aired yet), it seems very sad. There’s a slanted step near his doorway that is in question, and he can’t provide a ramp as he can’t touch the sidewalk. North Beach Sushi across the street has the same issue. Their ramp is deemed too steep. I’ve seen the ADA racket threaten businesses in other towns, and they ended up closing. The owner has never gotten a formal complain from a wheelchair-bound person, except for this suit. Every business on the block has issues. It’s sad that we can’t get the city to help mom & pops get in compliance. Anyone from the handicapped community want to chime in on what’s going on? I welcome the viewpoint.

Interesting follow-up articles:
The Price of Access: Part 1: Visionary law’s litigious legacy in the Sacramento Bee
PBS: A Decade With the ADA
ADA Filing Mills: Drive By Lawsuits in the blog OverLawyered

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Who’s in town? Former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, whose daughter Kara lives in San Francisco. Buried in this pre-convention interview with the 1988 loser is the news that “Dukakis, a railroad buff and former Amtrak board member, and his wife are joining two of their grandkids in San Francisco and riding the California Zephyr train back over the Rockies to the convention city” of Denver.

Anybody see Dukakis around town?

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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.

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That’s the Giants’ Nate Schierholz — born in Reno but schooled in baseball at San Ramon Valley High and at Chabot College in Hayward — kicking the ass of China’s catcher Yang Yang in yesterday’s Olympics win by the US team over China. Schierholtz has labored all year in the minor leagues — though he’s likely to be called up at the end of the month when rosters expand — but today baseball fans all over the country know he plays hard.

The hard play at the plate came in a game when China pitchers hit three US batters, including Schierholtz.

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Residents and shopkepers of the Castro district are getting tired of tour buses full of “gawkers,” reports the Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius. It wouuld be one thing if they bought lunch, but a deli owner reported:

They come in here, 15 or 20 at a time. They look around, take a picture, and then they walk out. In the last three months I’ve sold one bottle of water. It is not worth having so much traffic.

Supervisor Bevan Dufty says the plague can be exorcised by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But let’s not forget the famous response of the Summer of Love hippies on Haight St, as recalled by Mick Sinclair in his book San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History:

On Haight St. some hippies responded to the busloads of gawping tourists by holding up mirrors, inviting the “straights” to look at themselves.

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The LA Times had a nice piece today about Zyzzyva. The San Francisco litmag is still edited, after nearly 25 years, by its founder Howard Junker, though Junker is threatening to retire next year. I was charmed to read that Junker was a technical writer before being laid off by Bechtel, whereupon he founded the litmag. (Of course, the last time I was laid off by a high tech company, I finished my first novel during the downtime. And now look at me. I’m a technical writer again. And trying to finish my second novel.)

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That decaying building on the corner — haven’t you wanted to report it to someone? Those idiots speeding down your block — can you get the city to install a speed bump? How about that gaping hole in the sidewalk outside your neighbor’s house — somebody could get hurt. Why doesn’t someone do something?

If you’ve ever wanted City Hall to work like tech support, your dream has sort of come true. A new website, SeeClickFix, will take your complaint and create a trouble ticket. More than that, in San Francisco they’ll automatically forward the problem to the appropriate SF Supervisor’s office.

more after the jump

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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.

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A man whom police said was a transient living in his car before he allegedly ran over and killed two elderly women — one of whom he had to reach out his driver’s side window to push off the hood of his car before speeding away — was a former elite Silicon Valley engineer whose team invented a cancer-eradicating x-ray machine. But C. Wayne Cox, now 66, was laid off from that job in 1996 in a re-org, divorced two years later, and fell off the map. The white-haired former engineer was arrested while surfing the web in a Santa Clara public library after the librarian recognised him from news reports.

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In a town that loves people named Barry, the First Asian President visited San Francisco, cashing in to the tune of $7.8 million. Said Barack Obama to a heavily ethnic crowd: Ich bin ein desi.

The Giants’ Tim Lincecum struck out 10 over 7 2/3 innings, leading the Giants to a win over Atlanta, meaning that Georgia was having a bad day all over. Georgia does, however, have two golds and a bronze, one of the gold medals coming in women’s shooting. Maybe if that gold medal shooter were back at home, they wouldn’t have already lost the war.

One of the Dhaliwal brothers injured in the tiger attack is going to prison on a parole violation in a case that had nothing to do with the fatal mauling of his friend at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas Day.

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Progressive Reading Series organizer and well-known local author Stephen Elliot writes in the Huffington Post of last night’s successful event to raise money for recycling bins for Houston. They raised enough for 276  18-gallon bins, and more importantly raised the profile of the recycling program of the Texas city.

Previously:
Houston to accept donation

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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!

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