Gregory Lee Giusti

After the FBI hauled him away from his Tenderloin (of course!) subsidized housing building (of course!), his neighbors told TV reporters things like, “He was not one of my favorite people. He had a real attitude problem… I personally was afraid of him.”

He was even kicked out of a local church a few years ago for being “menacing while angry” and a general asshole. Apparently a tech geek (of course!), he rigged a system to make continuous harassing calls to church members.

But that photo gets me. It’s like a picture staged by The Onion to show a generic Tea Party protester all hot under the collar about Obama’s birth certificate, the New World Order, and the secret internment camps at Fort Irwin* for a story headlined “Local man can’t stand it when people won’t engage him in heated political discussion.”

*If this seems unnecessarily detailed, it’s because I’ve been reading up on right-wing paranoid drivel lately.

It’s election day! Who knew? In San Francisco, the only interesting thing on the ballot is Prop. D., the proposal to put giant Times Square-type advertising signs on Market Street in order to “enliven” it.

Are they kidding? Apparently not. Here are some arguments in favor and a Chronicle editorial against. And here is the whole list of issues and candidates running, including City Atty. Dennis Herrera (unopposed).

Go to the SF Dept of Elections for results tonight.

 
Flickr photo of Times Square by Scott Beale at Laughing Squid.

The Wondercon sci-fi fan conference is finishing up at Moscone. Here are Flickr photos from the shindig, all of them seemingly “All Rights Reserved.”

The New York Times today has a feature on Google’s Marissa Mayer, “employee number 20” and first female engineer at the software candyland. Oh wait, it’s just another corporation, I keep forgetting.

A Chronicle editorial says one out of three “massage” establishments is a brothel. Really? Only one out of three? Geez, I’ll bet it’s a pain in the ass to work at the other two-thirds and have men coming in all the time with the wrong idea. Shouldn’t they have some sort of identifying sign that means “Not that kind of massage place, really”?

I was inspired by Tara’s post, Public Transportation 2.0, to add more than a comment.

When I was in Bangalore in 2007, I was struck by the utility of the ubiquitous motorized rickshaws, known locally as autocabs or just autos:

Any visitor to Asia has seen these things, since they’re in every Asian city. And they are cheap and they are everywhere. When I mentioned them to one of the panjandrums of the Bay Area public transportation scene, the executive director of one of the NGOs that lobbies for transportation policy, he was dismissive. “Oh, the tuk-tuks,” he said. “They clog up the streets, and they pollute. That’s not what we need. We need commuter rail that goes everywhere.”

Oh, fine, Mr. Bay Area Transit Boss! So I’m on my way to work in the morning. Never mind how I get to the BART station; I take a train across the bay to, say, Ashby. Now that I have alighted at your gigantor 1970s-era concrete monster BART station, I need to get to work, 2.3 miles away. It’s too far to walk. I could wait 20 minutes for a bus, and then that bus would take 20 minutes to poke along for the two miles, making my trip to work take over an hour… And that’s why I drive every day instead.

Read more

A cadre of patriotic local Minutemen are supposedly headed to SF’s City Hall steps on Thursday afternoon. They plan a rally in front of the gilded dome where our broke city gov’t spares no expense in it’s quest to ignore Federal statutes regarding immigration law and deportation. Among the speakers will be SF native son Frank Kennedy, the brother in law of the late Anthony Bologna, 48, who was tragically murdered by AK-47 alongside his two sons, Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16 in June of this year. The suspect is a known thug, here illegally, who obviously was a solid candidate for prior deportation.

Scene Outside City Hall during last Minutemen protest on 7/31/08 ( pic by Bill Hackwell of IndyBay.org )

I imagine an afternoon filled with local news camera crews capturing loud & pointless shouting matches between the Minutemen and left wing activists and Mission District “community organizers” ( insert hearty Giuliani-esque guffaw here). Could be fun for people watchers & those with an interest in colorful signs, chanting & loud bullhorns.

The last time the Minutemen assembled here in July, there were far more counter demonstrators than the dozen-ish flag waving border sealing patriots. To see photos of the mob from IndyBay.org, click here.

I’m sure Mayor Newsom will make a point of not being there…
but for everyone else, the fun starts circa 11 am for the amusement of bureaucrats on break and those forced to come to City Hall to plead for a permit or tithe more taxes to the city.

The theme of the two hour Minutemen photo op is

“Protesting innocent American Victims of Illegal Aliens in Illegal Sanctuary Cities!”

Huh? Why are they protesting the innocent victims? What did they do?

[Photo by Ron English himself, presumably.]

This just went up the other day on the outer wall of the Shooting Gallery, on Larkin facing Myrtle Street. (It’s half a block south of Geary.) Mr. English is a Popagandist, as it were.

Related: the Shooting Gallery has a Shepard Fairey show coming up soon. I’ll keep you posted as I find out more.

[Via Juxtapoz, as usual.]

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?
(more…)

We have a follow-up to the news about Bourbon and Branch‘s Todd Smith stepping down from his management position…

Smith’s successors are Joel Baker and Yanni Kehagiaras (pictured above), a couple of local comptetion-winning bartenders (or as B&B calls them, “Bar Chefs”), both who have been working at B&B for a while now.

As mentioned previously, Smith remains connected with Bourbon and Branch’s Beverage Academy, participating in upcoming classes Cocktails 101 and A Taste of Absinthe.

Rumor has it that Bourbon and Branch is polishing up a new “secret” room dubbed “Russell’s Room”, occupying a space that was formerly J.J. Russell’s cigar shop during prohibition in the 1920’s. Hm, how many secret rooms can a speakeasy have?

Photo courtesy of Bourbon and Branch

Taking place this Saturday night (3/8) at the Ha Ra Club on Geary, the Naughty Librarians Convention!

Librarians are the new nurses and it’s time to break out your bookish booties for the sake of something hot: reading!

Dress as a sexy schoolmarm, a libidinous librarian or prurient professor and meet up at 2 p.m. Saturday for prim and proper cocktails at the Ha Ra club in the Tenderloin.

From there we’ll head to the San Francisco Main Public Library to put our hot nerdy mojo to work.

Hosted by Princess Honeybee. Sponsored by the Hoover Institution, the Mitchell Brothers, Focus on the Family and Good Vibrations.

Let them know your coming on Upcoming, http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/449103/?ps=6

By way of Laughing Squid >>> Cheesebikini.

Planning Issues, A Scarf Drive, Parties, Eats, Openings, Closings, Sales, etc

For an update of local small biz happenings around the bay read on…
(more…)