You live up front and carry around your ATV or motorcycles or whatever in the back
Archive for the ‘parks’ Category
The Angriest-Looking Travel Trailer Ever: VENGEANCE is Yours, on South Van Ness – A Fifth Wheel “Toy Hauler”
Thursday, February 26th, 2015A Graffiti Artist Took a Dim View of All the Rules at the Former Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park
Wednesday, February 18th, 2015Of course, you gotta have rules:
Strybing used to be free but now there’s a paywall, except the place still takes up our tax money, which doesn’t really make sense.
The crew that runs this place wants the former Strybing to be a “world-class” facility, whatever that means.
The crew that runs this place likes plants but not people, cause people cause problems.
Which is fine, they want to have a paywall, but why are we still supporting this place, I don’t get it.
The Pigeon Feeders of St Mary’s Square, West of the Financh
Friday, January 30th, 2015
Let’s hear from a Yelper:
“This park has turned into a dump. I walk my dog here everyday and have watched it deteriorate rapidly over the last year. I’ve found used needles in the grass, heard a junkie tell a tourist not to use the public toilet because they’ll get Hep-C, and watched the playgrounds turn into homeless encampments. I really don’t understand why the city has turned such a blind eye to the problems here.”
McKinley Statue Graffiti, 2015 Update: Yep, It’s Got Some More – Here It Is, More Evidence for Fence Proponents
Thursday, January 8th, 2015Here’s how things stand now:
And here’s a little history, complete with an artist’s conception of what the anti-graffiti fence would look like – keep reading down, through the webpages of time.
You know, fundamentally, this is the big landmark at the gateway to Golden Gate Park. I don’t like the fence idea but I also don’t like people coming by to see giant KKK letters on the base of this statue for days, weeks and months. And the Rec and Parks and Arts Commission people say it’s a real expensive PITA to keep the graffiti off.
So I don’t know…
The Thing About San Francisco’s Lands End is That It’s Basically One Giant Landslide Waiting to Happen
Wednesday, December 24th, 2014Take a look here, from about a week ago, from a time just before the recent mini-slides shut the place down for the next ten days:
Imagine the trail before the big slide of long ago. Imagine a flat road connecting the foreground to the background hundreds of feet away – that’s what used to be there before, but now the trail goes up and around this location.
Lands End is just like Devil’s Slide.
It’s a tough place to maintain a road…
I took my love and took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the mud-covered hills
‘Til the landslide brought me down
Objecting to the Following Dozen Words and Phrases Used to Announce the Seven-Figure Renovation of the Panhandle Playground
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014long-suffering playground [IRL, it’s an extremely popular playground. Its current Yelp rating is 4.5 stars, which is the very definition of almost perfect, right? And hey look, what about the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Yelp rating – it’s much lower, it’s actually just 2.5 stars, right? Is RPD “failing?” Should we simply fire everybody and start over? Hey, why don’t we start using objective measurements, like asking the playground’s existing customers what they think? Is that too radical a notion?]
finally [This “framing” assumes 100% of what the millionaire-run Parks Alliance nonprofit says is accurate]
Victim to time [Well sure, you could replace this or that at this location, but what’s so wrong with it? What makes it a useless tear-down?]
frequent wear and tear [Because it’s popular? We’re going to change it because it’s popular and it gets used?]
grown-up play [Turns out it was sixth-graders who busted the slide, per the word on the street]
the playground pales in comparison to other high-tech kids’ play areas in the city. [What on Earth could make a playground “high tech?” Like, “sure this playground is great, but I feel it doesn’t employ the most recent application of science?” Like, who says that? IRL, it’s perfectly fine.]
“failing playgrounds” [But the Panhandle Playground isn’t “failing,” right? Ask all the people who use it and try to find one person who would give it a letter grade of “F“]
“low household income” [Is this area a low household income area? WTF to that. In fact, the 94117 is an extremely high household income place, right? It’s off the charts, actually, nationally speaking. And even locally, it’s anything but a low household income area.]
low Parks Alliance Report Card grades and rankings. [Oh, here we go, here’s the problem. What’s the PARC and why does it matter?]
“an early holiday gift to District 5.” [London Breed is thinking “CHRISTMAS” but she says holidays – good for her. But who’s paying for this gift? Oh, we are? So it’s not really a gift, is it, London Claus?]
high-tech play matting [I have no fucking idea what this means. Currently, the joint is basically a giant sand box. Is this a bad thing? One supposes that some think so, but one doesn’t know.]
What would you like to see improved upon in our small neighborhood playground? [Keeping it the same, except for maintenance, which, if it’s lacking, then whose fault is that? Cough RPD, cough]
Wouldn’t it be ironic, dontcha think, if the Yelp ratings of the Panhandle Playground go down after we spend all those millions of dollars on this simple, functional playground?
We’ll see.
Surprise! The Evil New Corporate Boat House at Stow Lake Charges 26% Less for Row Boats Than the Old “Local” Boat House
Wednesday, November 12th, 2014Here you go, here’s the former “Save Stow Lake” website – this is where the “evil” language comes from.
One problem is that old vendor, the entity that the Save Stow Lake people wanted to “save,” charged too much money, starting about five or six years ago. For example, the old vendor would charge $19 per hour for some pretty busted up row boats.
The current rate is back down to $14 per hour:
And this is the cafe seating area, which doesn’t seem to get used too much. (The worry some people had was that this would become a high-end destination restaurant with concomitant traffic and parking hassles.)
Rec and Park has a lot of issues, IMO, and I’m unafraid to criticize it, certainly. But I didn’t see what the big beef was about putting the boat house contract out for bid. And of course, I still don’t.
Phil Ginsburg Breaks Bad! – Drains Lily Pond, Applies Sodium Hypochlorite and Calcium Hydroxide – Video of White Wasteland
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014I just caught a sneak peek of the sixth season of Rec and Park and boy, it’s a doozie:
Parks Chief Phil Ginsberg et. al. have cooked up a batch of white powdery chemicals…
…and they’ve applied it to the now-drained Quarry Lake / Lily Pond in Golden Gate Park.
Here’s what the place looks like now:
It’s a powdery wonderland, filled with all kinds of urban flotsam and jetsam…
…but there’s nary a peep out of those troublesome frogs.
Check this one-minute video of the place – it would be a good place for a seance or some kind of Wiccan ceremony this Halloween.
Here it is, a vast wasteland with the silence broken only by the occasional the calls of Belted Kingfishers (and, for all I know, Everdeen’s Mockingjays as well):
Confused Tourists Avoid Parking Near This Red Zone in Golden Gate Park, But Locals Know Better
Tuesday, October 21st, 2014It’s hard to see, but this curb on MLK is mostly red, so it looks like a towaway zone.
But the signs say forget all that and park for free for four hours:
Prolly the RPD or DPW or SFMTA or some sort of ALPHABET SOUP org should clean off the red / reddish paint but if you say anything about that, then they’ll start begging you for more, ever more money, oh well.
Also note the fresh broken glass on the sidewalk, oh well
Rites of Passage: Smoking Marijuana in the Golden Gate Park for the First Time – Cough, Cough, Cough, Cough…
Monday, October 6th, 2014One assumes it was somebody’s first time, what with all the coughing:
