The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches 5
and then moves on.
The formerly-controversial Sutro Tower, as seen from the northwest through the window of an Emirates Airbus A380 super jumbo jet.
See the entire Sutro Tower mise-en-scene here, courtesy of Telstar Logistics’ Todd Lappin.
Well, there she is - it’s the Supreme Master going down Market Street on the side of a Honda! All to announce the news that Supreme Master Television is going global. What’s that, you can’t tune into the Eurobird or the Intelsat KU-Band? Well then just check things out on the net.
Click to expand:
But whatever you do, don’t call it “cult television,” the way some people do. How wude! Would “cult television” give you a joke of the day finished off with a one-second cut showing the visage of “God’s Direct Contact” herself?
Of course, there are some downsides. Spoiler alert. Supreme Master Ching Hai has directives:
On the other hand, she raised thousands of dollars for President Bill Clinton, back in the day, and who could object to that?
Remember, “go veg, be green, save the planet!”
Local writer Anne Herbert, famous for coining the phrase “practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty,” recently announced on her blog:
The closer I live to Sutro Tower, the more I think it isn’t dangerous.
O.K. then. But who says Sutro Tower is dangerous? Well, for starters, the people who live around it in the Twin Peaks area, in small neighborhoods like Clarendon Heights and Midtown Terrace. Among other things, they worry about EMF radiation. They worry that the tower might fall down.
Sutro Tower at night under a shooting star. Looks safe enough:
But there’s not much they can do about it. The time to do something would have been back in the 1960’s when it was being planned.
So, let’s take a trip down Memory Lane and check out this 35-year-old piece from Stephen R. Barnett. He alleged:
…the project was cloaked from public view by a media blackout, a conspiracy of silence hatched by the TV stations that own the tower and joined by the Chronicle and Examiner.
Them’s fighting words, don’t you think? You might not agree with his conspiratorial tone, but we all can appreciate little nuggets such as:
“It is ridiculous to assume the FCC will require the entire tower to be painted with alternate stripes of white and orange.” Wheat declared. It “will doubtless be painted a neutral color consistent with the surroundings,” he assured the Supervisors.
As you can see, it’s white and orange to keep the FAA happy. Note the newish 125-foot-long, 10-ton auxiliary antenna mounted vertically
More recently, a movement was afoot to prevent the tower from going digital, but that didn’t work out.
There are updates for the digital future slated and there’s a lot of life left in this structure, so it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Check it. Your old-school TV, the kind that most Americans have, will stop working next year as we’re going to transition to digital service in 2009.
That means that your grandmother, who watches her stories on a TV with a “rabbit ears” antenna, is going to need your help. So you’re going to get her a Digital Television Adapter for free, or almost free, courtesy of Uncle Sucker.
How? Just go here and sign up for your nifty $40 coupons and then head on over to Circuit City, RadioShack, or the Best Buy.
And you’d better hurry before the Department of Commerce runs out of money.
Wait a second. Don’t sign up for your DTV coupon yet, because better, cheaper boxes are coming. The problem is that these coupons expire three months after they’re sent to you.
If you sign up too early, you’ll have to shell out your own money to supplement the coupon and your box won’t be all that good. If you sign up too late, then you’ll miss out on any subsidy. But if you time things just right, then you’ll get a sweet converter for free.
Or, you can just buy her a new digitally-enabled TV.
Choose wisely.