Like these guys.
It would take forever to make it up the stairs to the top of controversial landmark Sutro Tower, so a swaying elevator car is the preferred method.
Click to expand to get a closer look at a sunnier, more colorful San Francisco:
Take the tour.
Or at least that’s the way it seems from Twin Peaks.
Zoom zoom.
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January 1, 2010 has been a bad day weather-wise, but that hasn’t stopped vigorous San Francsicans from scaling the heights of Twin Peaks.
Another peak-bagger crests the highest part of San Francisco:
And this is their reward. There are two major bridges somewhere down there in the murkiness:
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Have a great 2010!
As seen from Cole Valley, with a #37 bus rolling by.
St. Ignatius Church looks really close but the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park is in between, so this building (or at least the dome at the back of it, anyway) is fully three-quarters-of-a-mile away:
It almost looks Disneyesque when Sausalito sets off fireworks, like on the Fourth of July:
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Not that you’d really be able to tell, though. Sutro Tower Inc. has just finished a project that had some of the digital TV broadcast antennas (not “antennae” – that plural term is only used for bugs in our silly English language) gaining a higher altitude.
Not much howver, maybe a seven-percent increase, max. Does that make a big difference? No, not for most people, but at least STI is trying.
Here’s the antenna of KPIX-TV (OMG, that’s the home of Eye on Blogs – big ups, Brittney Gilbert!) a way up top, like 1700 feet above sea level. Now Channel 5 is as high as possible:
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The Future is Now, and what’s labeled “CURRENT” is history:
From this:
To this:
Well, they were still wrapping the KPIX, KRON, KTVU antenna assembly, but you get the idea.
So it looks like we’re all set with the Great Digital TV Conversion of 2009. As long as Sutro Tower doesn’t get hit by a shooting star….
…we’ll be all right.
At first, I thought this aging Datsun* pick-em-up was affiliated with San Francisco’s famous Laughing Squid enterprise but, upon further review, these squid don’t look particularly jocular.
This vehicle shall remain a mystery.
Click to expand:
*
*It’s what we used to call Nissans, kids – it means the “son” the DAT car from Mssrs. Den, Aoyama, and Takeuchi)
This is what a Notice of Pesticide* Application looks like – it’s from our oddly-named San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. They’re spraying herbicides, like Roundup ProDry from Monsanto and Garlon 4 Ultra from Dow, on 15 hilly acres up there, right above the Midtown Terrace. That’s what Rec and Park is doing this month.
Why? Well, why not?
Targeted for extermination are Cotoneaster, Pittosporum, and Arctotheca calendula. See?
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Maybe it’s that stimulus money they’re spending.
Now, while the impoverished R&P is doing that, they’re also sprucing up, wait for it, the HQ building for the R&P.
See?
Maybe it’s that stimulus money they’re spending.
Oh well.
*Or “herbicide” – sometimes people call herbicides “herbicides” instead of pesticides. Sometimes.
It’s rare to be able to look up at the American flags atop the 345 California Building in the Financh and see that they’re hanging listlessly. Verily, October 24th, 2009 was San Francisco’s Day Without Wind.
See? Click to expand:
And this held true all the way to the evening hours way up at Twin Peaks, where people could enjoy the view without risk of hypothermia.
But, be warned. The winds will return with a quickness soon.
Oh well.
San Francisco’s famous Sutro Tower (owned by Sutro Tower, Inc., the buyer-offer and $hutter-upperof San Francisco’s mid-town NIMBYs) has a new look for Fall.
Here’s Before (a way back in August 2009)…
…und jetzt After, the way it looks these days (when being buzzed by a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-700 NG heading to El Lay, camera right, see it?)
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Très chic! Non?
Now, she’s all set for the next meteor shower:
Courage.
I’ll tell you, the reason why the home county of the exchange student who was recently sexually asaulted in San Franciscois resting easy these days is that the media of said home country isn’t aware of the attack. And why’s that? Apparently, it’s the policy of San Francisco to not give out that kind of information. Per the SF Appeal:
“Police are not releasing information about the country the alleged victim is from in order to protect her identity, Tomioka said.”
I’m wondering how small a country has to be such that saying its name discloses the identity of any particular tourist in San Francisco.
Like if there’s a famous exchange program in Monaco (population 30k) and they send ten students a year to the States? That would seem to fit the bill, fair enough.
But what if the exchange student is from one of the following Big Ten tourist-producing countries (countries avec concomitant robust, aggresive media, of course)?
Germany
United Kingdom
France
China
Italy
Japan
Canada
Russia
South Korea
Mexico
If the student is from one of these countries, I’d be hard-pressed to see how saying the name of the country would identify any particular person from that country. Maybe there’s a written policy, or maybe there’s an unwritten rule, the way the MSM won’t report routine cases of Golden Gate Bridge jumpings?
That is all.
