IMO, back then and now, lawyer Vince Courtney got outfoxed* by a layperson.**
But You Make The Call:
I don’t know, if I were a certain attorney, I’d let sleeping dogs lie.
But that’s just me…
*I can explain to you how “street mediation” works, you know, when conducted by peace officers in this kind of situation. Could this lawyer have been arrested? I don’t know. But he seemed afraid of something.
**I mean, he just pushed and pushed until he got the most he could possibly get, and he got it all recorded, and then posted it for tout le monde to see. That’s called advocacy.
(Artist’s conception, but the window was painted over for a while.)
And then it was all like this*
And now, just before the Great Lighting Ceremony of 2011, there’s no train at all:
Poor Obama!
(I’ll check and see if the Obama train pops up before Christmas. It’s a mystery to me. Of course, this is in Golden Gate Park on public land, as is the Prayer Book Cross and other things. Sometimes, We, those of us way out West, lose track of that nettlesome Bill of Rights.)
*Fear the beard and all. You know, I don’t think certain people, people like MC Hammer, understand that they threw their weight behind the Republican choice** for Mayor, understand that they (blindly?) supported the first choice of just 7% of San Francisco. We’ll see if they do this again.
**Ed Lee was the only viable candidate on the San Francisco Republican’s Endorsements webpage.
(I think I’m satisfied with that headline.) All right there’s this guy, let’s call him Manatease, who functions as our Department of Recreation and Park‘s number one social gadfly - I bump into him from time to time. And there’s this other guy who now runs the RPD - I think I might have been at his law school* the same time he was, a year or two apart maybe. O.K. then.
Apparently, one of them was haranguing the other in or around RPD HQ last week and that somehow led to an incident betwixt Manatease and a lawyer for the gardener’s union. Now, that’s not on tape, but the rest of it, including a humiliating apology, was recorded by some kind of beltcam or something.
I’ll tell you, I don’t share Manatease’s world-view, really. I mean I agree with some of his positions (like the advisability of charging foreigners $7 to get into Strybing Arboretum, coming soon) and disagree with others (like the idea of using park property to make a few bucks off of Peter Pan) [UPDATE: Well, I suppose I could have phrased this in a different way - I object neither to the general concept nor to this particular execution of using Sue Bierman Park, aka Ferry Park, aka Fairy Park, to put on Peter Pan].
But it’s Mantease’s right to “disrupt” the plans of RPD, correct?
A skinned knee perhaps but the quick brown red fox lives to fight another day. This is what the foxes of the San Francisco Botanical Garden looked like back in the day, back before I decided to never again step foot in the joint. As seen in the New World Cloud Forest:
I think the YouTube clip speaks for itself, but stay tuned for all the deets (from Manatease’s point of view, anyway), after the jump.
*Back in the day when it was a dirt-cheap** top-20 law school. (It’s neither of those things now….)
**For CA residents, that is - the price of tuition was less than ten percent of what USC’s was, back in the day. Those days are over, never to return. Oh well.
This year’s event will be all the more special in light of Barack Obama’s recent victory. The train underneath the tree features a huge Obama logo along with a few other Obama references.
