For over 25 years, dedicated family farmers and independent food purveyors from all over California have arrived at SF’s UN Plaza at dawn on Wednesdays & Sundays, setting up their temporary tents & tables to sell their produce and sundry products til about 5pm. Whether you like the wide array of greens or roasted nuts, dried fruits, dates, baked goods, cheeses, olive oils or even fresh fish & fowl, there’s something for everyone. Unlike the more pretentious and prosperous scene at the fashionable Ferry Building, this inauspicious & authentic farmer’s market is frequented by the denizens of the neighborhood, office workers on lunch break, old Chinese folks and some occasional tourists that find it upon emerging from BART. The prices are often half of what the other fancy farmer’s market might charge, and the scene about as bucolic and community orientated as one can get in “The Heart Of The City”.

If it wasn’t for the farmers & vendors who twice a week make the United Nations Plaza a lively civic gathering spot, the place is generally a desolate, if not dangerous empty expanse populated by sleepy doped up miscreants, drug dealers, ne’er do ‘ells, tweakers, stolen property salesmen and a spectacular variety of shady criminal thugs. The same city and it’s bloated bureaucracy, which had a big hand in letting the UN plaza slip into a symbolic cesspool of urban decay in the first place, now wants to manage the sole successful independently operated revitalizing factor in the area ? How uh, original…

The “Heart Of The City Farmer’s Market” at UN Plaza has long been organized and managed by an independent non-profit that was formed in 1981 starting with just 12 farmers, and some of the same vendors have been there since the inception. John Fernandez and his mother Christine Adams help manage the market that the city now has plans to “take over” after two+ decades, and they are not amused. Neither were at least a half dozen stall operators that I spoke to in an informal survey today, some who’ve been at UN Plaza since the very early days. They already dealt with this threat back in 1995, and here we go again, with a basically bankrupt bureaucracy that’s trying to dip it’s incompetent tentacles into something that isn’t broke, so why bother to fix it?
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With the combination of the sad steroids scandal shadowing baseball, and economic hard times bringing attendance down, Bud Selig and his boys have got a hard sell on their hands.

Leave it to “America’s Pastime” to pull through in a pinch, and in a country where half of all people are overweight, ya gotta keep fans fat & happy, so the teams are going all out this year…

The bloated innards of Oakland’s McAfee Coliseum will be filled with happy gorging bleacher bums this summer as the soon to be Fremont A’s offer up their take on the latest “innovative marketing” idea to hit MLB.

Hey corndog fans, have you ever craved “All You Can Eat” seating sections ?

Apparently the LA Dodgers started this ploy off a couple years ago, and it’s all the rage, with Nascar & Hockey Teams now doing it as well. Be amongst the first in the Bay Area to enjoy this symptom of our societal sickness, and an obsequious toast to obesity…

I know previous dollar hot dog nights in Oakland have long been an insanely popular tribute to the Bay Area’s reputation for gustatory excellence & impeccable taste, and if they throw in those nasty Nachos & bottomless Mountain Dews… now yer talking.

If you’d be interested in trying this out in April and filling your belly with an endless feast of soda pop, ice cream, franks and other ballpark cuisine health hazards, I’ve got discounted ticket code info below.

To purchase discount All-You-Can-Eat seats: visit www.oaklandathletics.com and select one of the below listed games, and enter the coupon code: EATS

This will get you in for just $20 each (instead of the usual $35) to enjoy your privileged feasting section at the following select games in April…

Saturday, April 5 vs. Cleveland @ 1:05PM
Friday, April 18 vs. Kansas City @ 7:05PM
Tuesday, April 22 vs. Minnesota @ 7:05PM

Order the tickets online, then get on Bart & get yer butt down to 7000 Coliseum Way in Oakland…

I ran across this 1977 BART map (on the left) on the Flickr page of a Mr. bobster1985. Contrast it with today’s map (on the right), which includes Caltrain, ACE, Amtrak and the Capitols.

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Thanks to just-completed work by Sprint, you can now yak on your cellphone in BART stations from 16th St. south. However, no service is guaranteed in the tunnels between the stations.

You can already use your cellphone in the Market St. tunnel, I’ve found. Transbay service is said to be next on the list.

From SFist. Fight on BART NYE, captured by a citizen journalist, who is then soundly punched. The comments on YouTube are amusing.

Also- we’re in for a big downpour as 3 systems converge from Alaska. Do I believe it? Guess I do, but it seems the forecasts have been dodgy lately. From Yahoo weather: “Tonight: Rain and wind. Low 54F. Winds S at 25 to 35 mph. Rainfall may reach one inch. Winds could occasionally gust over 50 mph.”

Y’know there’s so much going on in town , I’ve never been able to figure out why when I surface at 16th St. on most every Thursday night there’s a group of hipster spoken word sorta performers & audience types gathered…

Here’s a crappy cell phone foto for proof:

Of course, being less a journalist, and more a shy blogger kinda guy I’m always afraid to ask ’em, lest I seem an “unhipster” like “duh” dude…

I mean it is “the mission” after all…the kinda place you’re just as likely to bump into a crack dealer or the mighty hip Mayor on New Year’s eve, or maybe even the mayoral coke dealer…

uh, like, who really knows…

But, if you’d like to find exactly wassup with these yakking Bart Station frequenting ne’er do ‘ells and would like an obviously exposed to the various “elements” sorta entertaining time, there’s always a couple dozen verbose folks gathered betwixt 10:00-12:00 most Thursdaze at the stairs there

…go ask em yerself…

Me, I’m bloggin “live” from the Kilowatt and I’m more worried about Friday… and my picks and some MP3z fer yer rock n rollin entertainment pleasure are listed after the jump chump…
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In talking to coworkers in the East Bay that live in the City and beyond, the small consensus has been: don’t drive. Though one gal, who commutes from Walnut Creek, had to drive today as the BART parking lots keep filling up earlier and earlier. For me, I’ve been BARTing for various reasons- it’s more relaxing, I can write on BART, and the downtown cab-tango dance gets stale. Has your commute changed with the Bridge business?

10:30 AM Richmond bound train scene: brunette, 33 year-old (she told us) woman sitting on the floor in front of a 20-year old crunchie co-ed.

“In my country,” she rasps with the most smoky voice I’ve ever heard, “we love, we REALLY love.”

Pause, she takes the co-ed’s hand.

“And we hate, we know how to hate.”

Lots of palm holding and tracing, then 33 year-old starts compulsively tucking hair behind ears and coming hand through hair a few times. In the 20-minute trip from Embarcadero I had heard the introduction, the name exchange, all the way into the hand-holding. Co-ed had a bike and was positioning it protectively in front of her (it seemed).

I walk to the door to exit at MacArthur and the entire half of the train car is full of alcoholic sweat smell. Gotta love it- lovin’ in the mornin.

While Bart was circulating a warning flyer this week saying that 11% of robberies on the rail system were iPod thefts, and perpetually late Muni looks to fine transfer-less miscreants, Saturday’s NY Times profiles one of the Bay Area’s most beloved transit programs, that being Google’s shuttle service. The fleet of wifi equipped bio-diesel busses run by Bauer limosines traverse 6 counties, a range larger than any regional transit service, and daily whisk over 1,200 Google employees to and fro.

One well coddled software engineering Cow Hollow resident tells the paper of record of the corporate perk

“If they cut the shuttle, it would be a disaster.”

Meanwhile, rumor has it that someone is still waiting for a cab, a bus, a horse and carriage, anything at 17th & DeHaro… since last Wednesday.

In case you’re still stuck at work and planning to get on BART, heed the advisory from BART’s web site.

ATTENTION PASSENGERS: DUE TO A POLICE MATTER AT HAYWARD STATION; TRAINS ARE BEING HELD OUT OF HAYWARD STATION UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.. THIS IS CAUSING A DELAY IN SERVICE IN BOTH DIRECTIONS ON THE FREMONT LINE OF APPROX. 15 TO 20 MINUTES., IN ADDITION THE HAYWARD BART STATION HAS BEEN CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THIS INCONVIENCE ..THANK YOU!!!
Last Updated: Mon Jan 29, 6:10 PM

I caught a tiny bit of the info on the NBC 11 news a few minutes ago.

Edit: Story from NBC11 is now online. Possibly not a shooting?