The San Francisco Citizen

You can thank the New Deal for the Coit Tower Murals on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The Marriott hotel chain thinks these images are worth a look, so check them out next time you’re in the area.

Worthy of note is this section from Coit Tower’s first floor shown below. Click to expand: 

See how respectful everybody is of the paparazzi (Italian for “photojournalists”) rushing in avec tripod to make a little money off tragedy? That’s quite different from these days, when you can get Bjorked for simply saying hello.

Nowadays, if you point a camera at Seal (Mr. Heidi Klum) and try to greet him, he might ask why he would “shake hands with scum.” Ouch.

And whatever you do, don’t try snapping photos of Matthew McConaughey while he surfs down in Malibu. Cause the Malibu Pump House Gang just might mass up and take you out. (And let’s not even talk about Barbra Streisand’s place down there. By all means, shutterbugs, stay out of Malibu!)

Old Matt McC. must really hate the paps, as he cameo’ed in the dreadful Mel Gibson movie Paparazzi (directed by Mel’s hairstylist from Lethal Weapon!) back in ought-four. In fact, lots of stars must hate the paps, given the large number of famous people who appeared in this “amazingly arrogant, immoral film.”

But some of the less famous actually dream about being followed around by a paparazzo. So much so, that they even pay for the privilege. And you can do it also now that Celeb For A Day has a San Francisco office. It’s only $500 for half hour of snapping, so sign up today and bring back the happy times when everybody got along with the paparazzi. Hurray!

In the left corner we have One Rincon Hill, South Tower, standing 641 feet tall. Compare that with the “New Sheriff’s Facility” jail (the “glamour slammer“) on the right.

Which building is better?

Click to expand:

“I–my idea, when we started out was to have a, you know, rising up, in the form of an undulating, ovulating ground that you don’t get so much nowadays.”

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.

The sun always shines on TV.

The whole Cosco Busan deal  is hotting up these days. Check out the federal charges against Captain John Cota posted by KPIX here.

Here’s the rant part. The Busan hit the Delta Tower of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. It didn’t hit the “Delta Span”, despite numerous accounts reporting it that way.  A “span” is the more or less horizontal part of a bridge where you might see cars zipping by. A tower is the up and down part that helps support the spans.

Yet, we still hear about the span, even from the official federal paperwork:

“The M/V Cosco Busan departed the Port of Oakland in heavy fog and struck the Delta span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge…”

It’s very possible that Cota mistakenly reported to authorities that the ship “touched” the Delta Span. He was under a lot of pressure. The point is that whether you’re trying a case in real life or just in the press, it’s nice to get these small details correct. If half of the reports of what Cota said over the radio are incorrect, what other reported details are incorrect?

Lastly, take a look at today’s headline, below. It’s very possible that Cota could be found to have some or most of the responsibility for the oil spill, and yet not serve any time behind bars. So he might not be heading for “the brig” after all

Only time will tell.