Posts Tagged ‘1989’
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011
I’ll tell you, when I first saw these ugly flying buttresses holding up St. Dominic’s Church at 2390 Bush, I thought they were remedial, you know, like an add-on to a building in danger of falling down.
Then later on I saw images of other old-school buildings what had flying buttresses as original equipment, so then I thought, no, I was wrong, that’s just how this massive building on Bush was constructed.
But just today, I discovered that the nine concrete buttresses holding up St Dom’s are, in fact, add-ons, from back in the 1990′s, after the Loma Prieta. (Thanks, Wiki. You’re so smart!)
I still think that these things are seriously ugly, oh well.
But check it, the church has a five star average from 44 Yelpers, so this congregation must be doing something right, huh?
Click to expand
Keep on keeping on, St. Dominic’s!
Tags: 1989, 2011, 2390 Bush, bay area, building, bush, buttresses, california, catholic, church, concrete, Dominican Friars, earthquake, english, flying, french, gothic, loma prieta, lower, pacific heights, San Francisco, St. Dominic, St. Dominic's, steiner, street, western addition, yelp
Posted in architecture, buildings, religion | No Comments »
Friday, August 5th, 2011
The font you can see in the lower box looks like the groovy 1970′s to me, but I’m pretty sure it’s older than that.
Click to expand
I prefer the font on the upper box, for the record…
Tags: 1906, 1989, 2011, alarm, bay area, Blue, box, california, department, dept., earthquake, electricity, emergency, fire, font, hall ofjustice, letters, mayor's emergency telephone system, mayor's mayor, metal, mets, of electricity, paint, police, Public Utilities Commission, PUC, pull hook down once, red, San Francisco, sffd, SFPD, SFPUC, system, telephone, white
Posted in streets | No Comments »
Monday, February 7th, 2011
Let’s see here, can you spot the PG&E Tower of our Golden Gate Bridge in the lower left? Good, now check out vertical elements of our old and new San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridges.
Not much has changed with the poorly-managed 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake-related fix-up job that’s due to finish up sometime this decade, so there’s no reason to think that America isn’t still laughing at us.
Of course you should try to not to stare at the new ornamental tower when you are cruising by on the temporary S-curve. Safety First, right? Anyway, it’s a little higher now. See?
Click to expand
And, of course, Mike still sucks big titties.
That’s your Bay Bridge update for 2011.
Tags: 1989, 2010, 26th, 60 minutes, april, as big as your thumb, Bart Ney, bay bridge, big titties, bridge, ca, california, CalTrans, cbs, clousre, crack, day, delay, dot, earthquake, freeway on stilts, golden gate, graffiti, labor, loma prieta, mike, Oakland, San Francisco, sucks, whiteside, ybi
Posted in architecture | No Comments »
Monday, June 7th, 2010
It’s hard to say exactly how many people marked the 21st Annivesary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre* in front of the Chinese Consulate on Laguna down in the Western Addition on Friday, June 6th. It seemed like they had a caravan of 30-40 cars plus a giant moving van but I didn’t see a big crowd or anything.
A motorcade passing City Hall before the protest:
As seen on Laguna near Japantown:
The protesters had a lot of interesting posters displayed. Are people still jailed 21 years later? No se, I’m a little gun-shy about checking out strange websites ever since Google sent a message to warn me that, apparently, Red China (or, specifically, a dude with an IP address from Red China) hacked into my GMail account two days ago. And that struck the Googlers as a bit odd since I also logged in from San Francisco multiple times the same day. Oh well. China has lots and lots of energetic hackers operating for their own purposes 24-7, of course. Anyway, if you want surf around, knock yourself out:
The events of 1989 represented the huge challenge to the Communist Party of China’s position as supreme political authority in the world’s largest country. The Party didn’t know what to make of this kind of thing, at first:
Anyway, here’s the mise-en-scene from Friday: a protester carrying a funerary display up Geary, a plainclothes Fed (Jacqueline Bauer?) assigned to protect the consulate building, and a young dude from Armada Security paid hourly to do the same thing:
So, nobody scaled the building to fake hang themselves they way they did back in aught-eight. This was the scene just before a Chinese dude on the roof famously cut the suspension line. Simple physics tells us it took slightly more than a second for her to hit the balcony about 15 feet below. Ouch:
No, things were pretty mellow at Friday’s protest, excepting for the guy who shouted out, “Why don’t you all go home, motherfuckers!”
Something very San Francisco about him – what do you think, is it the convertible Mercedes lifestylemobile, the tattoos, the Hollywood-director baseball cap, the rage, the unsolicited advice yelled at strangers? Something in that area….
Cyclist gal was all, WTF, racist dude?
The next day, Armada had an older fellow marking time minding the store as baseball-hatted Chinese intelligence officers entered and exited the building.
Just another day in Paradise.
See you next year.
*With 400-800 deaths in and around the square, on or around June 4, 1989, all told – that still appears to be the best guess.
Tags: 1989, 2010, 21st, 21st Anniversary, anniversary, california, China, chinese, consulate, embassy, federal, geary, laguna, massacre, protective, protest, San Francisco, service, SFPD, Square Massacre, states, Tiananmen, Tiananmen Square, Tiananmen Square Massacre, united
Posted in politics, protests | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 21st, 2010
I’ll tell you, the kids these days, they want to get a deal, but they want their friends in on it to. Or something. I’m not sure how all it all works, but all’s I know is that I don’t see the downside to forking over four bones, waiting for a letter in the post and then going to an AMC theater like Metreon or AMC Van Ness to catch a movie.
You’ll party cause it’s priced like 1999 (or earlier). Speaking of which, I’ll remember that year as the era of the WebVan – the things were double-parked all over town. Anyway, they would pick up your choice of DVD or videotape at BlockBuster, deliver it to you, and then pick it up a few days later, all for free! Of course you still had to pay the rental fee, but you had to wonder how the transaction made money. (It didn’t, actually. I think the investors got 1% of their investment back, by selling off the vans and the Herman Miller chairs, an icon of the era. )
Anyway, check out this kgb Deal, comrade. (They’re saying $4 is the 1989 price to see a movie. I forget, but it sounds credible.) KGB is a new outfit, so I assume that they’re offering a good deal to make a splash.
In Soviet Russia, KGB deal with you, but in America, KGB give you deal. America, what a country!
Check the deets – they’re only mailing out to bay area addresses.
IMO, this is a good, albeit small, deal.
Choose wisely.
Tags: $1000, 1989, 1999, 4, AMC, BloomSpot, building, cadillac, coupons, deals, FreshGuide, Groop Swoop, group on, groupon, kgb, kgb deals, LivingSocial, LLC, Metreon, Savvy Avenue, SocialBuy, Specialdeals.com, theater, theatre, van ness, webvan
Posted in film | No Comments »
Monday, April 26th, 2010
60 Minutes just aired its big been-two-decades-after-Loma-Prieta-so-why-isn’t-the-Bay-Bridge-fixed-yet bit. It was mostly good, but let’s start with the bad:
“But they may not know their most important lifeline to the outside world is also one the weakest: the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco to Oakland.”
The Bay Bridge isn’t a “lifeline to the outside world,” of course.
Then there’s this:
”In 2004, Caltrans finished replacing half a million rivets with bolts and added 17 million tons of extra steel.”
Really, 34 billion pounds of steel? Isn’t that a lot? Wouldn’t that weigh more than every person in the western U.S.? Yes. How about 17 million pounds instead? (That’s a screaming error of more than three orders of magnitude. Journalists, when throwing about large numbers, try not to exceed three orders of magnitude. Of course, you should feel free to continue substituting million for billion and vice versa, I mean, they’re both big – they’re practically the same thing, right? Moving on…)
Now, speaking of bad, what about the workers who seem to have all the time in the world to spend tagging our cracked bridge instead of finding more cracks?
via CalTrans, actually
But hey, what about the good?
Well, there’s this:
“But the decision to build an architectural icon didn’t end problems – it started new ones. The most bizarre was with the U.S. Navy. In 1998, it refused to let Caltrans onto Yerba Buena Island to finish its engineering work. The Navy’s issue was whether the Bridge would overshadow the one-time home of Admiral Chester Nimitz, a hero of World War II.”
Did not know that. I knew there were some kinds of probs but I didn’t know that this was one of them. Bad form, U.S. Navy. Do you think old Ches cares about building shadows? I don’t.
And then there’s this:
“But for those who would say, ‘How dare you take that risk with the lives of people who live in this community,’ you say what?” Pitts asked.
Of course the interviewer didn’t get an answer, but thanks for asking.
Our tough old Bay Bridge has handled stuff like container ship and military jet crashes over the years. Let’s hope it can survive state, federal, and local government mismanagement for just a little longer.
Hold on, Bay Bridge. Hold on.
Tags: 1989, 2010, 26th, 60 minutes, april, as big as your thumb, Bart Ney, bay bridge, big titties, bridge, ca, california, CalTrans, cbs, clousre, crack, day, delay, dot, earthquake, freeway on stilts, graffiti, labor, loma prieta, mike, Oakland, San Francisco, sucks, whiteside, ybi
Posted in architecture, bay area, government | No Comments »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
California Attorney General Jerry Brown can’t abide car repair shop owners who rip you off for unnecessary work. News comes this morning about a judge in Alameda County who signed off on a:
“$1.8 million settlement that prevents Maurice Irving Glad (aka Mike Glad), owner of 22 Midas auto shops throughout California, from owning or operating an auto repair shop in the state, after the franchisee “deceptively lured” customers with cheap brake specials and then charged hundreds of dollars for unnecessary repairs.”
Now what do you suppose Mike did with some of that ill-gotten booty? Well, he traveled the world, natch, but he also produced an Academy Award-nominated documentary (narrated by Edward James Olmos!) called Recycled Life. (So all those people in the East Bay and the South Bay who thought they were just fixing their cars actually were financing the Hollywood dream factory by paying an average of $268 more than they should have….)
Anyway, get the deets below to see how our California Bureau of Automotive Repair does sting operations. And get the other side of the story from Mike’s mouthpiece via Henry K. Lee right here.
El Protector De La Gente, Jerry Brown:
Read all about it, after the jump
(more…)
Tags: 17200, 17207, 17500, 17535.5, 1989, Abbott, Academy Award, Academy Awards, ag, agents, Alameda County, attorney general, auton shops, bait-and-switch, bar, Be Glad, brake, brake adjustments, brake-cleaning, brake-drum repairs, brake-rotor resurfacings, Bureau of Automotive Repair, Business and Professions Code, california, California Attorney General, Campbell, class, Clovis, Concord, county, deceptively lured, Department of Consumer Affairs, District Attorney, documentary, Dublin, Edmund G. Brown, Elizabeth A. Egan, Elizabeth Egan, franchisee, fremont, fresno, Governor, hayward, inc, jerry brown, Jerry Brown Throws Down, Jr, M.I. Glad, Manteca, Maurice Glad, Maurice Irving Glad, Merced, Midas, Midas International Corporation, Mike Glad, modesto, nominated, office, operations, Recycled Life, San Francisco, san jose, san leandro, scam, section, settlement, So Glad, specials, sting, Tom Orloff, Turlock, undercover, Walnut Creek
Posted in crime, government | No Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Can you hazard a guess as to why?
Here are all the deets:
THE BIG RUMBLE – SAN FRANCISCO
20th Anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. The Big Rumble commemorates this anniversary with a week-long series of special events designed to connect our communities with preparedness resources.
Join us in October for The Big Rumble, as we come together as a community to learn more about how we can be better prepared for all types of emergencies. Events will include entertainment, activities for kids, free giveaways, and valuable preparedness information.
Venues and Entertainment
Bayview| Joseph Lee Recreation Center | Oakdale Ave and 3rd St.
Sila: Kenyan Afro-Funk band led by Victor Sila
The Congress: Neo-jazz project led by producer/trumpeter Marcus Cohen
Breakdancing Performance by Acrosports All-City Team
Marina| West Side of the Marina Green| Between Scott ST. and Avilla
Gaucho: San Francisco based Gypsy Jazz Sextet.
Kally Price: Local Jazz and Blues vocalist
Devine’s Jug Band: San Francisco’s favorite Jug Band.
Sony Holland Duo: Bay Area Jazz vocalist
Mission| Parque Ninos Unidos| 23rd and Folsom.
My First Earthquake. San Francisco Electro-pop dance group
Locura Trio. San Francisco Based Flamenco rock group
Aceituno Arts Capoeria Exhibition. Capoeira Exhibition by student owned Martial Arts Studio
Family Style: Jazz and Funk Ensemble
Sunset | 20th Ave. and Irving St.
The Slayers Club: Local DJ collective
US Wing Chun: International Martial Arts Studio
West Sunset ReConnect Steel Pan Drummers and Dance Ensemble
Tags: 1989, 2009, anniversary, area, Bayview, big rumble, district, drill, earthquake, fairs, loma prieta, marina, mission, quake, resource, San Francisco, shake out, sunset
Posted in events | Comments Off
Friday, April 4th, 2008
This was the scene today in historic Portsmouth Square in San Francisco’s Chinatown – the mayor signing autographs after announcing a list of some of the torchbearers who will relay around the city on April 9th.
In the foreground is another kind of torchbearer, the Goddess of Democracy. Some might have preferred to cover her up with a tarp as was done before, but she was pretty much ignored today.
Let’s not forget about her, in all this Olympic excitement.
(more…)
Tags: 1989, 2008 beijing, democracy, goddess, Olympics, portsmouth square, San Francisco, Tiananmen
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
