A little jumpy as they didn’t have image stabilization on little cameras back then:
Some parts of the City I recognize easily and other parts I don’t…
Posts Tagged ‘united’
December 3rd, 2011 was San Francisco’s DAY WITHOUT CLOUDS – A Jumbo Sky Filled with (Quiet) Jumbo Jets
Sunday, December 4th, 2011Yesterday, owing to the unusual winds what blew away* the fog, I saw jumbo jets above S.F. in places where I normally don’t, but I couldn’t really hear them. (I guess jets have gotten a lot quieter these days.)
Like this low-flying United Air 747-400 near the Ferry Building – you could hardly hear it:
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*I suppose – cf. yesterday’s Blue Sky Red Bridge from Burrito Justice
Your Alarmist Food News of the Day: Lead-Contaminated Honey from China Makes Up One-Third of U.S. Supply?
Friday, August 19th, 2011Writer Andrew Schneider has been all over his adulterated honey story for a while.
Via Kyle Mizokami, here it is:
“Asian Honey, Banned in Europe, Is Flooding U.S. Grocery Shelves – FDA has the laws needed to keep adulterated honey off store shelves but does little, honey industry says.”
Do you buy all that?
So, you see, the mom-and-pop ops in the PRC use lead solder in their unlined honey collection vessels and then the honey gets transshipped to India and then it comes here because it’s banned in the EU, or something like that.
Seems plausible…
Delightful: Hand-Written Boarding Passes from United Airlines Add an Old-School Touch to Your Flights
Monday, June 20th, 2011
Hey South San Francisco! Or Should I Say “Baden,” Your Real Name? Stop Trying to be Something You’re Not
Monday, November 8th, 2010I don’t know, S.S.F. Your real name is Baden, right? So why do you try to attach yourself to San Francisco?
And you’re not even contigulous with us, you’re not connected to us – you’re about five miles south. So, using your absurd naming scheme as inspiration, what’s there to stop Inglewood, CA* from reincorporating as South Beverly Hills or South Bel Air? Wouldn’t that be equally as ridiculous?
How about SFO West as a new name on Sign Hill if you hate Baden so much? (And oh, BTW, Sign Hill is the very same mini-mountain that a United 747 almost crashed into back in 1998 because the Pilot in Command forgot what to do when an engine fails – he tried to compensate by turning with his hands instead of his feet – almost killed a bunch of people.)
Click to expand
And another thing, Baden, what’s this “THE INDUSTRIAL CITY” stuff? Your average employed resident is in the service sector, non?
*Always up to no good.
Tiananmen Square Massacre 21st Anniversary – A Black Celebration at our Chinese Consulate
Monday, June 7th, 2010It’s hard to say exactly how many people marked the 21st Annivesary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre* in front of the Chinese Consulate on Laguna down in the Western Addition on Friday, June 6th. It seemed like they had a caravan of 30-40 cars plus a giant moving van but I didn’t see a big crowd or anything.
A motorcade passing City Hall before the protest:
As seen on Laguna near Japantown:
The protesters had a lot of interesting posters displayed. Are people still jailed 21 years later? No se, I’m a little gun-shy about checking out strange websites ever since Google sent a message to warn me that, apparently, Red China (or, specifically, a dude with an IP address from Red China) hacked into my GMail account two days ago. And that struck the Googlers as a bit odd since I also logged in from San Francisco multiple times the same day. Oh well. China has lots and lots of energetic hackers operating for their own purposes 24-7, of course. Anyway, if you want surf around, knock yourself out:
The events of 1989 represented the huge challenge to the Communist Party of China’s position as supreme political authority in the world’s largest country. The Party didn’t know what to make of this kind of thing, at first:
Anyway, here’s the mise-en-scene from Friday: a protester carrying a funerary display up Geary, a plainclothes Fed (Jacqueline Bauer?) assigned to protect the consulate building, and a young dude from Armada Security paid hourly to do the same thing:
So, nobody scaled the building to fake hang themselves they way they did back in aught-eight. This was the scene just before a Chinese dude on the roof famously cut the suspension line. Simple physics tells us it took slightly more than a second for her to hit the balcony about 15 feet below. Ouch:
No, things were pretty mellow at Friday’s protest, excepting for the guy who shouted out, “Why don’t you all go home, motherfuckers!”
Something very San Francisco about him – what do you think, is it the convertible Mercedes lifestylemobile, the tattoos, the Hollywood-director baseball cap, the rage, the unsolicited advice yelled at strangers? Something in that area….
Cyclist gal was all, WTF, racist dude?
The next day, Armada had an older fellow marking time minding the store as baseball-hatted Chinese intelligence officers entered and exited the building.
Just another day in Paradise.
See you next year.
*With 400-800 deaths in and around the square, on or around June 4, 1989, all told – that still appears to be the best guess.
Why are San Francisco’s New “Low-Cost” Airlines More Expensive than Regular Old Airlines?
Monday, March 1st, 2010You know the JetBlue and the Virgin America, right? Let’s review:
“JetBlue Airways is an American low-cost airline…”
“Virgin America, Inc. is a United States-based low-cost airline…”
Well, check out what the suits attending the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Transformation 2010 convention at the Hilton San Francisco Union Sqaure are paying to fly in from and back to the Big Apple, assuming they’re stuck in the coach section during this Great Recession:
Click to expand
See that? United, Delta, American and Continental all were quoting airfares less than $300, and the ”low-cost airlines” were the most expensive.
Perhaps sexy new Virgin America and JetBlue should be called premium airlines these days?
Just asking…
Recalling the Close Call United Flight 863 had with Mount San Bruno Back in 1998
Monday, July 6th, 2009There wasn’t all that much coverage of the incident back in the day, so the time that a United Airlines Boeing 747-400 out of SFO with 300 people aboard came super close to crashing into 1,576-foot-high San Bruno Mountain is worth remembering.
Did the pilot at the controls really forget how to steer the plane after one of the engines failed and lots of vibration began? Pretty much. But everybody treated this near miss as if it were an actual accident and procedures for pilot training are now better because of it.
The proper way to clear San Bruno:
Click to expand.
Some of the locals of San Mateo and San Francisco living around the mountain won’t ever forget hearing and feeling that particular flight.
That’s something to think about when you’re out and about near the mountain, huh?
Emirates Airlines Launches Non-Stop Service from SFO to the Middle East
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008From yesterday, here it is at SFO: a brand spanking new Emirates Boeing 777-200 LR (Longer Range) straight out of Dubai, on a non-stop flight that lasted almost two-thirds of a day. Click to expand:
Captain Marc, after having flown part of the flight in from the United Arab Emirates:
And this was the reception, starring His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates Airline:
Gina Antonini, until recently a star athelete at UC Berkeley, addressed the crowd on behalf of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is into the idea of Green Flights. What made this flight green? Lots of things, including a continuous decent over Northern California:
San Francisco International Airport Director John Martin, the aforementioned HH Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, and Steve Kava, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Chief of Staff, all fielded questions at the presser:
And look who’s asking questions – it’s pugnacious New York Times aviation repoter Joe Sharkey, who seemed to be in pretty good shape despite the efforts of the Brazilian aviation system to kill him a few years back. (For now and forever, Nobody Leans on Sharkey’s Machine.)
The mood was jovial, despite the concerns expressed by Mssrs. Matier and Ross, Ashley Harrell and KGO-TV:
Speaking of which, Emirates released a pretty emphatic statement this afternoon:
“Emirates is in full compliance with the laws of the city of San Francisco, the state of California and the United States. Emirates is also in compliance with the Human Rights Commission.
Emirates does not discriminate in hiring in any way, including hiring based on sexual orientation, hiring of single pregnant women or hiring based on weight. We require our cabin crew employees to undergo a medical evaluation to confirm their ability to meet the requirements of the physically-demanding job, but we do not discriminate in hiring based on the results of those findings. Our hiring process is based purely on job qualification.
Emirates is committed to fair practices in employment and hiring in all countries in which we operate. We look forward to serving the Bay Area community.”
Boutros M. Boutros
Senior Vice President, Media Relations, Sponsorships and Events
Emirates Group
So, smiles everyone, smiles!:
Let’s say good bye to Boeing’s big twin…
…as it travels up through Canada, over the pole and down Russia way.
Thursday’s flight is already fully booked, so it looks like EK225 / EK 226 will be a success at SFO.
And if that pans out, maybe we’ll see the A380 superjumbo back at SFO on a regular basis.
Will Dubai become the Hub of Everything? Only Time Will Tell.
More nitty gritty after the jump.
Airlines Tell Passengers that Oil Price Speculators are Responsible for High Airfares
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008According to the airlines, via that lapdog of the Air Transport Association of America known as Stop Oil Speculation Now, there is a:
…force at work that, like gravity, is invisible yet powerful. This force is rampant speculation. Every time you buy products such as food or gas, you are impacted by unregulated, secretive and often foreign commodities futures markets. Speculators in these markets are increasingly buying and selling commodities such as oil even though they have no intention of using the product.
First of all, who wrote this copy? Bob Shrum? Second of all, Hillary Clinton didn’t intend to use all that sugar and eat those cows when she speculated in the commodities markets and nobody complained about that, right? Speculation is now supposed to be a bad thing?
Our corporate overlords are worried:
Could there be a more likely explanation for high prices for avgas? CBS News offers a few. Is it possible Bill O’Reilly might be wrong? Or, maybe all this talk of speculation being the cause of high fuel prices is just a Nixonian Fallacy.
Check it out and decide for yourself. Maybe you’ll agree that both you and the airlines are being victimized by those invisible, powerful, secretive, foreign forces.
The airlines have to come up with something to explain all those fees and surcharges, right?
I shift the blame
To the worm in the bottle
I shift the blame
To anyone standing before me
