The San Francisco Citizen

Only in Marin! That’s right, Marin County, the birthplace of mountain biking, and home to nuclear-tipped missiles, endangered deer, and marauding mountain lions (nee cougars), can’t abide you people building your own single-track MTB trails.

Michael Philip More is getting a ten-day jail sentence for illegally building a quarter-mile trail at the end of Robinhood Drive in San Rafael.    

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Possible path of the trail, the white line is a quarter-mile long

Does Michael More wish there were more singletrack MTB trails in Marin? Given that MTBers are mostly confined to fire roads in Marin County, signs point to yes.

Carole Migden’s antiwar message is proving irksome to some in San Francisco these days. Can you imagine? Senator Migden, first runner-up in the Bay Area’s recent District 3 election (that means she came in second place, contrary to what you’ve been told, dear reader), still carries on with her antiwar message.

And now Street View shows it seems she has support of Google as well. Oh noes!

Petaluma-based Diggler, the original mountain scooter company, is selling more and more of its products to San Franciscans. Check out this sweet electric ride seen at Crissy Field.

And check the video. Maybe a little more practical than an E-Glide electric skateboard, anyway.

So when you hear the name Diggler, don’t think about Dirk Diggler (or Brock Landers), think about scooters.

Here’s the latest from the exotic deer wars up in the Pt. Reyes area of Marin County.

A little background about the “hired killers” is here. Of course, California State Senator Carole Migden has been on this issue for a while now. But the Feds have a different point of view about “exotic ungulates”.

The plan is to have all these deer gone withing a decade or two. And that rubs some people the wrong way.

Please don’t shoot me just because I don’t come from here! Some exotic deer inside of the Point Reyes National Seashore:

It seems the way the Federales have handled the culling will give animal lovers lots to argue about over the coming years and decades.

Let’s hope we can get to some kind of solution soon.

Apparently, the freeways of California are open to scooters, if they’re the right kind. Like this Suzuki Burgman for instance, seen on the 101 heading north in Marin County.

Read all about these fast scooters here (and discover the set up for the Chronicle’s off-colour moped joke here). Maybe this is your new set of wheels?

Forget about that other District 3 poll, the one that had to be pulled due to cheating by Internet-savvy individuals. Here’s the latest from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Their survey currently shows Carole Migden leading with 54%, Mark Leno at 43% and Joe Nation trailing with 3%.

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Get in on the fun right now and cast your vote. You can’t win if you don’t play!

Check out what local attorney and former Newsweek cover boy John Corcoran saw on the streets of Marin County the other day: a Golden Gate Transit bus supporting both Carole Migden and Mark Leno for the same office.

Perhaps the other candidate, Joe Nation, could buy the ad space on the right side of this bus? 

The election is just a month away - things are only just getting started…

Attorney and Political Consultant John Corcoran using a BlackBerry 8100

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. 

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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.  

The Marin Independent Journal is trying to do the best it can in this Internet Age. That means putting content online and maybe allowing for a reader poll on some topic of the day.

Last week, IJ editor/writer Brad Breithaupt wrote a piece about the sprawling 3rd Senate District involving “incumbent Senator Carole Migden and her two challengers, Assemblyman Mark Leno and former [A]ssemblyman Joe Nation.”

Readers were allowed to cast their vote for whomever they favored until someone at the IJ cancelled it. Why? Check it:

“Due to suspected ballot-box stuffing, results of the poll will not appear. You dirty rascals!”

Thusly:

Appears is if more than one person repeatedly voted for a particular candidate and, so much so, the results got all screwy. Apparently, “cookies” were involved.

Now, who would do such a thing? (If only Marin County had its own Matier and Ross to get to the bottom of this!)

Can’t we all get along?