Look at this huge Christmas Tree taking up all the space at a bar on Lombard Street’s Motel Row.
It’s been covered over with Valentine’s day-related tchochkes, gewgaws, knickknacks, baubles, and lagniappes.
See? (Customers’ and employees’ faces darkened out of respect.)
Happy Valentines!
Let’s review here - Tourism Queenland’s recent Best Job in the World promotion had some bloke getting paid $100k to be a caretaker on an Australian island. The whole thing was quite popular worldwide and some people figure that it got the Australian tourism industry eight figures worth of free advertising all told. (Or course, if you wanted to be considered seriously, it really helped to be young and cute, just like in the real world.)
All right. Today, comes now FlavorPill.com to offer you another job down under. They want you to apply by February 15th, 2010 to be their new part-time online editor in Melbourne (it’s near Cindy, I think) starting September 1, 2010. They’ll pick up your airfare and they’ll put you up for 12 days but it’ll be up to you to live on $400 a week for a year or whatever.
And, oh yes, you’ll need to qualify for a Working Holidays in Australia visa and that means you’ll need to be between 18 and 30 years old. So you have to be kind of young, but nobody will care what you look like. Bonus.
Just think, this could be you with a cute attentive beach kangaroo:
And this is how you’ll look surfing down under with your cute, attentive boyfriend:
This is something betwixt the best and worst jobs in the world. Keep that in mind as before you become one of the world’s highest-paid part-time bloggers (as you struggle to afford a daily cup of coffee.)
Its you:
Come Out and Live, Play and Work in Australia as the New Flavorpill Melbourne Editor! Flavorpill Announces Job Opportunity for a Young American; Visa Program and Travel Deals Available for Others Wanting to Work and Play in Australia
Los Angeles, CA – (February 9, 2010) Thanks to a visa program and some great travel deals available on Australia.com/workandplay, Flavorpill, an online source for culture, events and current news in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and London, is getting ready to launch Flavorpill Melbourne! There’s just one thing missing: an editor.
Americans ages 18-30 can apply for the Managing Editor position at http://flavorpill.com/australia/submit.html. Just tell why you deserve the position and what experience you have with writing, editing and social media. The deadline for entries is February 15, 2010.
“The ability to go to Australia for up to 12 months, get a job and experience our unique and diverse adventures through the Work and Holiday Visa program makes the opportunity with Flavorpill’s new Melbourne newsletter a dream job. This is a great way to add to one’s resume by joining the locals and getting off the beaten path,” said Tourism Australia Vice President Americas Daryl Hudson.
More deets, after the jump.
See?
These buildings look like boxed-up presents under the tree the way they’re lighted during the holidays.
Presenting Embarcadero Center 1, 2, 3, and 4:
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Either it’s National Daiquiri Month and the Powers That Are at City Hall wanted to honor California’s strawberry and lime / avocado growers, or….
…this lighting arrangement is the best They can do to approximate Christmas Red and Christmas Green down in Civic Center. (Way too much yellow in that “green” IMO.)
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I’m sure somebody better at Photoshop than I could tone down the riot of color in this photo in order to properly honor Natalis Invicti, or the birthday of baby Jesus, or whatever. But hey, what about the new hires at City Hall? That crew of recent gubernatorial campaign workers seems to be famliar with Photoshop…
Or not – they didn’t do a very good job it would seem. Oh well, the unaltered photo above will have to do as the record of what Christmas 2009 looked like at City Hall.
Hey, speaking of Christmas, there’ll be no more stars on government trees up in Sonoma. Remember stars atop government Christmas trees? We had a big star on our big tree in Civic Center until about a year ago when it got took down, forever. Oh well.
Merry Christmas!
This was the scene over the weekend in the Financh where eight (or four, whatever) local police agencies teamed up for a DUI checkpoint on southbound Montgomery at Pine Street. Never seen one of these before – let’s take a look.
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Not all the traffic coming down from North Beach to SoMA last Friday night had to stop – lots of cars were directed straight on through. But those that weren’t had to pull over to the right for a brief convo with a peace officer of some stripe.
Like the driver of this Mercedes E350, for example. Don’t think she was a drunkie, but she had some sort of registration hassle it appeared (and that’s not all that uncommon in this age of shut-down, furloughed DMVs.) Stop sign holder graciously provided by PG&E:
Oh well. But let’s say you fail your field sobriety test on Montgomery Street. This is what’s in store for you – a trip into the huge mobile command post parked on the same block. No waiting:
Meet your breathalyzer, the Intoxilyzer 5000 infrared spectrometry breath alcohol measurement tool. (This is important, cause if your shyster is going to get you off, well, however that ends up being, it will most likely have something to do with attacking the procedures used to record the .15 BAC score you blew. Again.) Speaking of mouthpieces, you’ll get your own 28-cent plastic disposable mouthpiece to blow on. (Always wondered how that worked.)
Most people didn’t seem to mind, and the way that Montgomery is set up with three-way lights (to let the throngs of imagined evening-hour financial district peds scramble across Montgomery any which way they want) being picked to be a part of the checkpoint might not actually have slowed the journeys to the nearest freeway onramp:
Check out Friday’s tally of arrests and tows from CBS5. And here’s the scorecard from a another recent checkpoint at Geary and Steiner, and here’s another from Monterey near San Jose.
So, hurray. There’s not a lot to object to here, unless you’re a mouthpiece for the American Beverage Institute that is.
Look for more checkpoints in the coming weeks…
Or the Castro, whichever.
From the year 1924, Number 798 is the last of its kind.
Via Troy Holden:
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This is how the Holiday Tree in front of San Francisco City Hall was lit at night last year:
Via Steve Rhodes, who, like Visa, is Everywhere You Want To Be.
But all that color in Civic Center offended certain WASP-y type people. People like Thurston Howell III et ux Lovey:
So here are the expensive new lights for 2009, or some of them anyway. These colorless lights cost $13,500, per City Insder Rachel Gordon.
That ought to placate the richers for a while.
But couldn’t Rec and Park have put this matter to a vote, maybe online using that social media and whatnot? A penniless blogger could throw up a voting system in about five minutes – can’t Rec and Park do the same? This isn’t a matter of health or safety, right? So it seems appropriate that the Gilligans, Professors and the Mary Anns should have a say as well. Why do we seem to only listen to the Howells?
Oh well.
For 2009 anyway, enjoy your boring, WASPy-white, star-free Christmas Tree, San Francisco. But don’t give up Hope for Change (is that a “traditional” train ’round the tree R&P?) next year.
I don’t know, these polar bears at first looked to be part of some art installation, but it turns out that that’s just the way the managers of the buildings at 555 and 575 Market Street decorate for Our Winter Holiday.
O.K. fine. But Chevron’s an oil company, right? Most of the employees shipped out to San Ramon a while back, but are there a few left up there?
Oh well. Presenting the Bear of the Decade and Symbol of Global Warming, Ursus maritimus:
This one looks a bit weasly (or ferret-ty), huh?
Enjoy your polar bears, workers at Chevron Towers….
This is how it goes when you’re a little less than cooperative and you’re arrested for burglary on Duboce near Steiner in San Francisco. You’ll have SFPD ten cops sitting around waiting for the paddy wagon.
When the van arrives you’ll get picked up by four of them and get carried away horizontally and face down.
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That’s the difference between an arrest and a Terry Stop, which one officer can do all by his lonesome.
And oh yes, feel free to use the term mother fucker as a noun of direct address as you get spirited away.
It’s your right as an arrestee, after all.
Now, “as you might expect” - that has to do with the Christmas shopping season of course. You very well might expect SFPD cops standing on street corners doing nothing, but I’ve never seen the kind of holiday-season police presence that we have now. Doesn’t seem like the usual San Francisco approach, actually.
Another Brother getting hassled by The Man, or something like that. Lady Gaga was shocked by this Terry Stop(?) (I used to know this stuff, when I learned it back in the previous decade, when you were probably nine years old). And Snoop Dog? He didn’t say a word. Good thing they were protected from falling Hibernia Bank bricks, anyway:
Is this due to a new police captain at the Tenderloin Station? Or is it due to our new police chief? Maybe both?
No se.
On It Goes.
