The San Francisco Citizen

This poor red-tailed hawk was minding its own business in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park just before an aerial assault from a couple of American crows.

Of course, part of the business of hawks is raiding the nests of crows and ravens, so this kind of harassment is understandable.

As always, click to enlarge:

Canon 400mm f/4.0 DO IS diffractive optics lens at f/8.0. (Too expensive, overrated, has weird bokeh at times, needs to be stopped down, lacks a focus preset ring - but aside from that…)

To find out, let’s hear from Jordan Kobert, former Strategic Operations Manager of the San Francisco Chronicle. After getting numerous phone calls to get him to sign up for six months of home delivery, he talked with a salesperson and then rejected the idea:

“Less than a dime a day and I said no.

Did I mention I used to work at the Chronicle…”

That’s got to hurt. Apparently, the folks selling subscriptions are wheeling and dealing, so you can get it for less than a dollar a week. They might even let you name your own price and they might even throw you a $10 Target gift card.

It’s quite obvious the Chronicle, like the free San Francisco Examiner, gets a great deal of value from your eyeballs reading their ads reliably on a daily or almost daily basis. Maybe this is a good deal  for you?

Which job is lonelier - shilling for the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle? Tough call.  

Some people think of Sausalito as a Portuguese fishing village and that’s kind of credible.

This atypical view of San Francisico with Sausalito in the background makes S.F. look a little like a village as well - evidence of Manhattanization is to the left, so all you see is basically the same as what you would have seen in the 1930’s.

Some people would like to construct tall buildings on the waterfront, but there’ll be a lot of fighting before that happens. 

Click to expand.

An online article about grisly cougar attacks written by a Wisconsonite created some confusion recently, due to regional differences in the use of American English.

Commenters made references to Kim Cattrell and Jennifer Anniston. Why? Because the word cougar means something different these days, at least in California:

COUGAR: An attractive woman in her 30’s or 40’s who is on the hunt once again.

You don’t buy that? Well, check out this dictionary.com entry with keyword-based advertisements referencing “Date a Cougar” and, from the AARP, ”Cougars and Younger Men.”

So, that’s a cougar. Here’s a mountain lion from Marin County, California:

nollij via Flickr

That’s a good name, right? It’s like this: Kim Bauer was scared by the mountain lion.

And what about puma? Well, everybody knows that’s a kind of shoe from Germany. (See fake Michael Schumacher wearing a pair of  Puma car racing togs right here, just before his Ferrari F355 Spider got towed by the SFPD.)

So, a cougar is a person, a puma is a shoe, and a mountain lion is a mountain lion. Simple, right?

Now you’re talking Californian. Enjoy.