The San Francisco Citizen

The remnants of an exploded purse on San Francisco’s Ashbury Street.

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The driver of this aging Volvo either managed to parallel park with amazing aplomb, or managed to get stuck through the poor practice of at least one other driver.

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You should always leave room for others to get out, of course.

Check it out - right in front of the University of San Francisco’s Malfoy Hall (where Draco and Lucius got their MBA’s) are two parking spaces where you may park forever. That’s right, no two, three, or four hour neighborhood parking limit but also no street sweeping hours either.

Just down the hill, you have to move your car on Wednesdays, and just up the hill you have to move your car on Mondays. Just consider these spaces on Fulton your own personal open-air garage.

Just check it occasionally to see if it’s been tagged for violating the rarely-enforced California 72-hour parking law and you are good to go.

Finally, the little guy gets a break!

When you’re visiting San Francisco, you should always remember that you shouldn’t commit assault and/or battery on a woman in broad daylight near a busy intersection such as Van Ness and McAllister. Now, maybe you didn’t hit her but you touched her and chased her and she yelled out, so that’s going to start a chain of events that inevitably winds up with you being in the hands of the SFPD in about three minutes.

Passersby don’t really care if you have a domestic dispute, a business dispute, or any other kind of dispute with the woman wearing boots and a sundress. They’re all going to call 911 ASAP. What are you thinking, dude?    

The detention and makeshift interrogation begins. “Are you high?” Click to expand:

WHO: You, the dude in the suit.

WHAT: Attempting to detain somebody against her will on the sidewalk.  

WHY: Doesn’t matter.

WHERE: Across the street from San Francisco City Hall.

WHEN: The morning of a huge Anti-Prop 8 protest at City Hall.

That’s your lesson for the day.

This was a close one. For a while there, San Francisco’s Upper Sixth Street (also known as The Flank, owing to its proximity to the Tenderloin) managed to get along without the latest shipment of alcohol from this huge Budweiser 18-wheeler. But all were relieved when this vehicle took up it’s familiar parking space smack dab in the middle of the northbound lanes and started offloading the lager.

Perhaps Drs. Anheuser and Busch prescribed 2,000,000 ccs’ of lager, stat?  Click to expand:

Well, you might not be able to get pizza delivered in this area near Market Street, but at least you can get your beer on.

‘Cause is there’s anything this two-block section of San Francisco needs, it’s more beer.

District 11 Supervisorial candidate John Avalos has an army of enthusiastic supporters that, literally, money can’t buy.

Of course you can pay people to help you out, but pound for pound, the best assistance you can get comes from committed volunteers.

A scene from Mission Street: 

John preparing for another ride in D11 with supporters.   

In these days of Instant Runoff Voting, it can be hard to hazard a guess as to who might win this election tomorrow but, after travelling up and down a short stretch of Mission in the Excelsior District, it’s apparent that Avalos is handily winning the battle of the campaigns.

You’ve heard of ephemeral vernal pools, but San Francisco has its own version - autumnal lakes of water that rise up after heavy rain sometimes. Let’s call this one Lake Ashbury.

The cover on this legally parked bike certainly earned it’s keep the other night, battling waves of water 10 feet high.

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Such is the plight of those who park motocycles on the mean streets of San Francisco.

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.  

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

That could be the only reason why this Parking Control Officer tagged each one of these illegally cars parked in the middle of the damn street on Fulton in Civic Center yesterday. A passerby from some do-good organization shared a few words about how DPT doesn’t tag cars parked in this fashion on Sundays.

The PCO said she was doing as she was told, and then proceeded to write $60 citations in this target-rich environment.

Can you see one of the tickets? Can you see the PCO?

Whenever you feel that parking laws don’t apply to you because you’re part of a special group and DPT has a tradition of non-enforcement, you shouldn’t feel angry when the rules all of a sudden start getting enforced.

You should be happy about all the tickets you avoided when you parked for free all those many weeks, months or years. Plus, it’s a piece of cake parking legally for free in Civic Center on Sundays.

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:

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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!