The San Francisco Citizen

The latest chapter in the long story of San Francisco’s Bicycle Plan began today with this filing from the office of San Francsico City Attorney Dennis Herrera. (Earlier chapters of this tale dealt with local social gadlfly and self-confessed JFK conspiracy theory crank Robert “Crazy Rob” Anderson and his successful efforts to get the city to do an environmental impact study.)

It seems that certain areas just can’t wait for the bureaucratic gears to grind, so a judge is being asked to give the city and county permission to get started sooner rather than later.  

Dennis J. Herrera, San Francisco’s happy warrior:

What areas are those? Well, how about Market and Octavia for starters. But there are other problem areas as well. Try these on for size:

Polk Street between Beach and Market Streets, where 73 motor vehicle-bicycle collisions have been reported since 2003.

The length of Valencia Street, where the 65 motor vehicle-bicycle collisions reported since 2003 include a large proportion of “dooring” incidents.

The Third Street Corridor, where the 32 collisions involving cyclists and motorists reported since 2003 include one fatality of a bicyclist struck by a truck at Third and Marin Streets.

Folsom Street between 13th Street and the Embarcadero, where 52 bicycle-related injury accidents have been reported in the last five years.

Lower Market Street, from 8th Street to the Embarcadero.  Some 179 bicycle injury collisions have occurred along the entire length of Market Street, from Castro Street to the Embarcadero (including the Market and Octavia intersection) over the past five years.

What will Judge Peter J. Busch make of this? We’ll have an inkling by the end of the month.

Today’s filing certainly seems like a well-tailored request…

The owner of this car that was spotted in the South of Market Area of San Francisco has multiple signs visible from all angles advertising the futility of breaking in.

Now back in the day, you could go out and buy a simple yellow “NO RADIO” sign to hang in your car. Those signs went out of fashion for whatever reason, so now there’s no excuse to not create your own haiku or senryu.

Click to expand:

PLEASE
DO NOT BREAK
WINDOW

I HAVE NOTHING
INSIDE
MY CAR

NO MONEY, NO
CD
NOTHING

Does this approach work?

Well, it can’t hoit.

AGING TOYOTA

CRASH, ANOTHER WINDOW GONE

SOON, WINTER ARRIVES

Try it yourself. What would you write?

I don’t have much in my life/ But take it, it’s yours

Well, it’s on SFGate so it must be true: “Thousands of demonstrators” gathered in front of San Francisco City Hall this morning to voice their beef with Prop 8. That’s a big improvement over coverage from the MSM from just a week ago.

Famous blogger Phil Bronstein now makes light of the erroneous estimate of 1000 souls from the Chronicle / SFGate / the Associated Press at last week’s march down Market Street. Apparently, being off by an order of magnitude or two on crowd estimates is par for the course in the mainstream media. (Be careful, else you’ll wind up on the “Gay Enemies List,” and you don’t want to be there.)

Count for yourself:

What’s interesting is that there appears to be no effort to figure out what went wrong with the 1000 person estimate. It was a mistake made by one person that didn’t get caught by the vaunted multi-layer vetting process that separates newspapers from the Internets. Oh well.  

Watch ABC News play it safe here:

One of the largest rallies was on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, considered ground zero in the battle for same sex marriage. Lesbian activist Carole Migden whipped the crowd up as she declared, “They hate us. Let’s just acknowledge it.” Then she pushed the crowd “to turn our rage into action.”

A partial speakers list:

Senator Carole Migden
Senator-Elect Mark Leno
Assembly Member-Elect Tom Ammiano
Amos Brown
Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis; Plaintiffs in the California marriage case
Mark Oliver and Clark Pingree; Representing “Mormons for Marriage”
Rev. Dr. Penny Nixon
Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake

And speaking of SFGate, let’s take a look at a charming comment contained therein:

thechamp1 11/15/2008 12:27:51 PM FIRST COMMENT : EAT SH** AND DIE FAG*S

Oh well.  

Off the protesters went up Market Street.

To be continued…

This march looked like it was going to be huge before it even began at 5:30 PM tonight, what with eight choppers above the staging area.

As was seen with the recent candlelight vigil, there’s a lot of energy left in San Francisco to fight 2008’s Proposition 8.

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Local pols Bevan Dufty, Jose Cisneros and Carole Migden were last seen heading towards the march. This one had the look of having tens of thousands of participants, when all is said and done.

To be continued…

UPDATE: CHeck out the Comments section for the test of some of the signs, courtesy of petshop grrl:

“- IT’S ABOUT C-I-V-I-L MARRIAGE, STUPID
- WANT ACCESS TO 100% MARRIAGE NOT 90% CIVIL UNION
- STOP READING THE BIBLE W-R-O-N-G
(STOP READING THE BIBLE G-N-O-R-W)
- THE COURTS ARE THERE TO PROTECT MINORITIES
- EVERYONE STRUGGLES FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
- SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
- WE ARE NOT GOING AWAY, CALIFORNIA
- RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY HAS NO PLACE IN CIVIL LAW
- MY MOMMY IS “CIVIL-UNIONED”… GREAAAT
- “I’M MARRIED” “I’M CIVIL-UNIONED”:
IT SURE FEEELS DIFFERENT, DOESN’T IT?
- MARRIAGE ALWAYS WAS A CIVIL CONTRACT — NOT RELIGIOUS
- STILL WANT MY TAX-EXEMPT STATUS, PLEASE
- STILL WANT MY “WEDDING” PRESENTS — NOT CIVIL UNION PURCHASES
- SEPARATE CAN NEVER BE EQUAL
- SECOND-CLASS CIVIL UNIONS — NOT!
- I CAN’T TALK ABOUT MY TWO MOMMYS IN KINDERGARTEN CLASS
- SHARE, SHARE MARRIAGE
- 48 TO 52%
A BEAR MAJORITY IS BALANCE?”

This was the scene at 939 Market the other day when well-wishers sent so many celebratory balloons to Obama Biden HQ that there was trouble getting them all inside.

Such are the troubles of a front runner.  

Click to expand:

Will you take today or tomorrow off from work to volunteer, as Barack asked you to?

If you want the short version of what happened last night, take a look at Dave Golden’s great high-ISO photos with his Nikon on Flickr (which would not be possible to produce with Nikon digital equipment even just a few years ago) and this early report on SFGate and this rather negative take from KPIX. And see street party suppressor David Perry point of view here.

Or you can have the long version:

First, let’s travel back in time to San Francisco Halloween Past. It looked like this, with huge crowds in the Castro District:

Click to expand.

See the huge crowd?

Even crosstown rivals the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders managed to get along:

But the word crowd starts with the letter “C” and that rhymes with “T” and that stands for Trouble.

So now in 2008, Halloween in San Francisco is officially cancelled, or not, depending you look at it. Last night we had this, a police effort to keep traffic moving through the Castro. At this, the SFPD generally succeeded. Because the spice must flow, you know:

Read all about it here, which reads like the official blog of the City and County of San Francisco. Now, of course you can still see what the old Halloween looked like, before the NIMBY homeowners of the Castro got their way, but just not as much of it.

Honoring the late Yves Saint Laurent:

Credit cards! Now, those can be scary, especially these days.

And speaking of scary, how does evidence of falling gas prices scare potential alernative vehicle investors?

Per reports, about 30 people were arrested in the Castro are for being drunk in public.

Anyway, that was unofficial San Francisco Halloween in the Castro. Some people didn’t show because they listened to the white men here.

As for Official San Francisco Halloween in Parking Lot A:

You could watch Godzilla for free with a handful of others…”

…or listen to a perfectly viable Latin jazz band with a couple hundred of others.

Turnout was about what you’d expect to get in a dark parking lot with heavy police presence.

Speaking of which, the city’s official free party is a magnet for young people and all the assorted trouble young people get into to. You can’t sneak in, so you have to go through a Super Bowl style security cattle chute. So the criminal element circles around the parking lot, attracted and yet repelled.

Add it all up, and the Castro area comes out ahead as far as personal safety is concerned. Next ranked would be inside the perimeter of Parking Lot A. Last ranked would be the area surrounding Parking Lot A. If you charged a cover, then you’d keep out the riff raff, but then why would people come?  

A brief police detention on 3rd Street, just outside the official party near AT&T Park. 

Possession of eggs on Halloween is not yet a crime, at least not yet, anyway.

Akit brings it all home for us on his blog.

On it goes.

Happy Halloween. See you next year in the Castro!  

Obama ‘08 Headquarters at 939 Market Street near Fifth receives yet another delivery of oversized balloons from well-wishers.

Click to expand:

They barely fit through the front door

Look out! The same people (such as “composer, lyricist, scriptwriter, concert hound, music reviewer and web designer” Mark Tyne) who brought the Death of Castro Halloween funeral procession all the way down Market Street from the Ferry Building in 2007 are at it again.

Except this year the theme is the Death of Wall Street and the Rebirth of Castro Halloween. So we’ll see you out there, unless you get cowed by the ham-fisted “Home for Halloween” people, who would probably prefer you to stay at home and watch Major Dad reruns on the telly.

This pair of queens in the Castro shared a nice moment with a masked wrestler back in 2006, back in the good old days:

See Dow. See Dow die. Die Dow, Die!:

Death of Wall Street Funeral

 Procession

 
Halloween 2008 - San Francisco

——- DIE DOW DIE ! —-

 

Come mourn “the death of wall street” &

celebrate

“The rebirth of castro Halloween”

(funeral procession)

Halloween - Friday 10/31/08

A condominium on Harrison Street in the SOMA area of San Francisco for $200K-something might sound appealing to some.

Here’s what they’re saying about this new garage-free development.

Click to expand.

As they say, it’s not for everybody.

Or a Smart Car. Either way.

Seen on Market Street. Click to expand: