The San Francisco Citizen

The bird on the left in this photo from Golden Gate Park is an adult that has adopted the baby Brown-Headed Cowbird on the right. The baby cowbird’s real mother is a brood parasite, so she doesn’t know how to build a nest of her own. She just lays eggs in existing nests and lets other parents do all the work. When the interloping egg hatches, the newborn cowbird succesfully competes against its nestmates.

The tricked parent bird doesn’t know the difference and works twice as hard to feed the baby cowbird. In this scene, the young cowbird receiving food is already bigger than its adoptive parent. 

Click to enlarge:

These cowbirds were native to the Midwest, but some of them traveled to the bay area about 85 years ago. Cowbirds remain a threat to native species in the bay area and beyond.

It’s just been three days since Amy Keyishian and Randy Hauser got married but they already have happy memories of a bliss-filled trip on a paddleboat around Stow Lake in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

And what accompaniment they had in the back seat - the silken voices and twinkling ukuleles of The Paper Dolls! (Which Morrissey / Smiths songs did they play?)

via artolog’s Photostream 

Congratulations go out to Randy and Amy!

Details are a little sketchy, but the San Francisco Bomb Squad has just picked up a “package” and is taking it on a slow tour through Golden Gate Park. [UPDATE: The whole affair ended “peacefully” per KGO-TV]

Why the scenic route? So if it goes kaboom, it won’t hurt you all.

This was the scene at 6:30 PM, near the de Young Museum. Click to expand:

The starting location on Carl between Frederick and Williard:

Sarge in the front, mortar in the back:

The sticker on the red metal bucket says: “I HEART EXPLOSIVES.” (Don’t we all.) From a couple hundred feet away:

A bald eagle, sticks of dynamite and the Golden Gate Bridge:

Keep up the good work, San Francisco Bomb Squad!

You can see the culprit reflected in this car’s windshield - it’s a sap-filled Eucalyptus globulus (aka Tasmanian Blue Gum, Southern Blue Gum or Blue Gum Eucalyptus) just waiting to rain down on your vehicle.  

Of course a garage around in the area of Golden Gate Park or it’s Panhandle could run you something like $10 per day. Maybe you’d feel a little gumminess is a small price to pay for free parking?

Your choice.  

Well, park it where you want, but don’t be surprised if it looks like this by the next day.

Local artists used this Sprinter 2500 van as their canvas:

Welcome to San Francisco!

The California Department of Food and Agriculture called it quits today on the issue of spraying for the Light Brown Apple Moth. All of a sudden like.

The family that Stops the Spray together, stays together (or something like that).

This should be gratifying to Senator Carole Migden, who thinks, “Bay Area residents ought not to serve as guinea pigs and have their health jeopardized for an ill-conceived program and an unproven approach.” 

The same with San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who says he’s, “glad CDFA appears to have accepted the inevitable.”

So after all these months, that is that.

Radiohead’s recent attempt to give away concert tickets failed in France because people were too lazy to pedal their bikes on over to pick them up. Quelle horreur!

But things will be different if Radiohead tries the same stunt in San Francisco this summer.

A rainbow over Golden Gate Park from the San Francisco Botanical Garden. The park will be In Rainbows once again when the Outside Lands music festival starts up on August 22nd.

In fact, if Radiohead tries to give away tickets to people who cycle to some office building in San Francisco, a riot will probably break out.

There Will Be Blood, or at least a squabble or two. But, rest assured, all available free tickets will get distributed and used.

See you there! 

The first two days of ChihulyPalooza in Golden Gate Park were well attended, despite the admonishment of New Republic Art Critic Jed Perl:

Everybody rushes to the Museum of Modern Art and the De Young, two overblown buildings with sporadically important collections, while the most beautiful museum in the city–the Legion of Honor, in which masterpieces by Watteau, Le Nain, and Seurat have been given a thrillingly elegant installation- -is hardly ever mentioned.

Well, consider the Legion mentioned, Mr. Perl. Now on with the show:

Director John Buchanan speaking with Dale Chihuly earlier at the preview. Click to expand:

Let’s head outside to see the spectacle in front of the museum. A man controlling his metallic fire animals obscured by propane gas:

The Crucible’s Educational Response Vehicle. Have anvil, will travel:

The thrill of sending a plume of fire skyward the first time:

A bed of nails with a fretful ballerina on top:

And inside the museum, cherubs everywhere:

See you there!

The sport of Hooverball has found it’s way to San Francisco.

Hoover-ball is a medicine ball game invented by Herbert Hoover’s personal physician to help keep then-President Hoover fit. In general, the game is played on a volleyball type court of grass or sand and involves throwing a heavily weighted medicine ball over the net. Officially, in Hoover-ball, the medicine type ball weighs about six pounds, and is thrown over an eight-foot volleyball type net.

Here’s what HB looks like in action. Check out some more short videos here and here.

Click to expand. Throwing around the old six-pound medicine ball in the Panhandle section of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

What’s holding you back? Start your own league today. Amazon will sell you a ball for like ten bucks.

Game on!

Here’s the situation. This recent photo shows an interstate bus parked in the westbound bike lane of John F. Kennedy Drive in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Of course the curb is painted red so people shouldn’t park there, but they do. 

So where should a bike rider go? Well, around the bus of course, but that seems a tad on the dangerous side. For some odd reason, somebody decided that JFK should have the widest bike lanes in all of Christendom. And there’s an old tunnel under the road so it has a little kink, as seen here, right in front of the Conservatory of Flowers.

When you’re mapping things out in an ivory tower (ala the abysmal Octavia Boulevard) it’s a little tough to see how things will work out in real life.  

In real life, pugnacious-looking, Norman Maileresque bus drivers will park their 8.5 foot wide rigs wherever the Hell they want.

So, is there another way to handle the striping on this piece of road? Maybe compromise on bike lane width? Maybe take out parking on the eastbound side of the street? Anything?