As this driver just did, loaded up with household goods for a trip back up north to Oregon or Washington or whichever state is named on the license plate.
Thusly:
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What drivers do is get stuck on Market outbound and then they see the No Left signs one after the other, 2nd, New Monty, 3rd, 4th, 5th and then they get frustrated and make a left on 6th Street, as here.
And when you make that kind of move, the cops can see you from all around.
(What we should have are signs saying No Left Turns Next 2 Miles, or something, like what we have on 19th Avenue, an official State Highway.)
Of course, if the driver were on Market heading inbound at this very same intersection, then a right turn would be mandatory and going straight just might get her a ticket as well. The thing about that, tho, is that the chances of getting a ticket for not turning right is way less than 1% but, well, making a left you are just begging for a ticket.
(Which you can just throw away once you get back to home state, if you want, IDK.)
All right, TTFN. But remember, We’ll Always Never Have Paris.
IRL, Paris, France is friends with just about everybody. The list of partner cities:
2012: San Francisco 2011: Dakar 2011: Sao Paulo, signed an amendment to the Cooperation Agreement of 2004 2011: Yerevan 2011: Rio de Janeiro 2011: Ramallah, signed a pact of friendship and cooperation inauguration, the Garden of Nations, a bust by French sculptor Emile-Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), including Ramallah to Paris 2010: Doha 2010: Tel Aviv-Jaffa 2009: Istanbul 2009: Quebec 2009: San Francisco 2009: Rio de Janeiro 2009: Quebec 2009: Jericho 2009: Istanbul 2007: Phnom Penh 2006: Montreal 2006: Cairo 2006: Beirut 2005: Copenhagen 2004: Tunis 2004: Sao Paulo 2004: Rabat 2004: Casablanca 2003 St. Petersburg 2003: Quebec 2003: Algiers 2002: Geneva 2001: Porto Alegre (joint statement) 2001: London 2000: Madrid 2000: Athens 2000 (updated in 2004): Washington 1999: Warsaw 1999: OVA (Arab Towns Organization) 1999: Mexico 1999: Buenos Aires 1999: Amman 1998: Sydney 1998: Sofia 1998: Lisbon 1998: Yerevan 1997: Tbilisi 1997, Santiago 1997: St. Petersburg 1997: Riyadh 1997: Prague 1997: Beijing 1996: San Francisco 1996: Quebec 1996: Chicago 1995: Jakarta 1993: Beirut 1992: Moscow 1991: Seoul 1987: Sanaa 1987: Berlin 1987: Amman 1985: Cairo 1982: Tokyo 1958: Kyoto 1956: Rome (Twin Exclusive)
And in other news, George P. Shultz was a Nixon and Reagan appointee, not a Carter appointee. (You’d be amazed how many people think (or say) he’s a Carter appointee.)
Anywho, ever more deets, including a visit to Le Twitter HQ in the corrupt Twitterloin:
“From September 25 to 28, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, is visiting San Francisco to strengthen ties and cooperation between the two cities.
The mayor of Paris has a full agenda for his stay in California. After a welcome reception at the Consulate of France in San Francisco, he visited two companies Parisoma and Twitter. 27 in the morning, he will go to Parisoma a common workspace, exchange and support for entrepreneurs. Created by the French Stéphane Distinguin, Parisoma accompanied nearly 300 start-up since its inception in 2007.
Bertrand Delanoë must also discover the new headquarters of Twitter in the SoMa district, the famous social network of micro-blogging, along with its CEO Jack Dorsey. With New York, Paris is the city with the most subscribers to his Twitter account, and this year the City of Light became the first in the world to exhibit his tweets in the public space, the place Châtelet.
Paris delegation has always aimed to encourage more trade with San Francisco, mainly on economic and technological. Several meetings with the mayor of this city, Edwin Lee, are well planned and Bertrand Delanoë is expected to sign a memorandum with him, in line with those of 2006 and 2009 to facilitate cooperation. This will be an opportunity to discuss joint projects twinned towns and to consider connections between the research teams.”
I don’t know, if I wanted to create gridlock in SoMA / Financial / Union Square, I think I’d hire some jackasses to drive “mobile billboards” around the block and around the block all day long.
“Blocking the box” yesterday with a mobile billboard truck in the middle of the intersection of 3rd Street and Market:
“Hey everybody! Stop everything and look at me!”
Reverse angle – now the driver is only blocking one lane of 3rd Street:
Note the Washington state license plates.
And here’s the result of the advertising trucks. Gridlock:
Oh well.
“Blocking the box” is illegal these days, but the SFPD doesn’t really hand out tickets for that, so have at it.
Now I’ll tell you, Lyft taxi, a service that you just might like, isn’t legal, but mobile billboards, a “service” that you don’t like, are legal, more or less.
I don’t know what the CoS was thinking when it picked a historic triangular building right across the street from the Transamerica Pyramid for its San Francisco / Bay Area HQ, but, owing to the foot traffic, only a few Anonymous people are necessary to turn the whole place into a circus.
Anyway, if you go down to Chinatown, I don’t know, maybe around Grant Ave. and Washington, and you start punching the Falun types, well, you just end up in Community Court and then be forced to write insincere apology notes, and to attend Anger Management courses, and to keep away from Grant Ave. and Washington.
“Yongyao Wu (right) assaults Falun Gong practitioner Derek Wang in San Francisco’s Chinatown on June 10. Wu was found guilty by a Neighborhood Court on Aug. 13. (Courtesy of anonymous bystander)”
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So, I sort of knew about this sitch, but I didn’t know how things turned out.
But the new news is that you can watch this flick for free now via the NetFlix.
It’s just released. See?
“This movie is: Exciting”
(But, sorry streamer-only NetFlix people, right now you can only have them mail you the DVD or the Blu-Ray – you can’t just stream this to your device.)
And no, I don’t think Vietnam Tom Bruso, or anyone else on the bus that day…
“The Subway to Nowhere. House Chamber, Washington, D.C. June 27, 2012. Remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock (R-CA).”
“Mr. Chairman:
This amendment forbids further federal expenditures for the Central Subway project in San Francisco.
The project is a 1.7 mile subway that is estimated to cost $1.6 billion –– and those cost estimates continue to rise. Its baseline budget has more than doubled in nine years and shows no signs of slowing. The current estimate brings the cost to nearly $1 billion per mile. That’s five times the cost per lane mile of Boston’s scandalous “Big Dig.”
It was supposed to link local light rail and bus lines with CalTrain and Bay Area Rapid Transit, but it’s so badly designed that it bypasses 25 of the 30 light rail and bus lines that it crosses. To add insult to insanity, it dismantles the seamless light-rail to BART connection currently available to passengers at Market Street, requiring them instead to walk nearly a quarter mile to make the new connection. Experts estimate it will cost commuters between five and ten minutes of additional commuting time on every segment of the route.
Even the sponsors estimate that it will increase ridership by less than one percent, and there is vigorous debate that this projection is far too optimistic.
I think Margaret Okuzumi, the Executive Director of the Bay Rail Alliance put it best when she said,
This administration is attempting to put federal taxpayers – our constituents — on the hook for nearly a billion dollars of the cost of this folly through the “New Starts” program – or more than 60 percent. We have already squandered $123 million on it. This amendment forbids another dime of our constituents’ money being wasted on this boondoggle.
Now here is an important question that members may wish to ponder: “Why should your constituents pay nearly a billion dollars for a purely local transportation project in San Francisco that is opposed by a broad, bi-partisan coalition of San Franciscans, including the Sierra Club, Save Muni (a grassroots organization of Muni Riders), the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods, and three of the four local newspapers serving San Francisco?
Why, indeed.
I’m sorry, I don’t have a good answer to that question. But those who vote against this amendment had better have one when their constituents ask, “What in the world were you thinking?”
# # #
This amendment to the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Act (HR 5972) was approved by the House on June 29th. The legislation next goes to the Senate.
San Francisco isn’t getting more space for these critters but they already have as much as they need here now, not that some area dog owners agree with the way things are these days.
Anyway, here are some San Francisco Snowy Plovers and the also the deets of the new agreement with the Feds are below.
(Oh, and remember, as always, plover rhymes with lover.)
Now, Ocean Beach Dog, ooh, somebody over there got an off-leash ticket from the Feds a looooong time ago. (Can you guess what year by looking at the website design? Sure you can.) Oh well. Well, the Feds don’t like Ocean Beach Dog and people what behave like Ocean Beach Dog. The Feds consider us Whacko City, USA because of outfits like OBD, oh well.
Most dogs don’t bother the boids, of course. Can you see the snowy plover?
But some dogs do harass the birds. (These aren’t actually snowy plovers near Lawton and the Great Highway but the dogs don’t know or care about that.)
(Get those Ocean Beach birds, good boy!)
And here’s the sitch up in Crissy Field:
See the birds, see the unleashed dog?
Is is surprising to you that an unleashed dog could find and chase these plovers? What was surprising to me was to hear that this particular boid flew up from Morro Bay (where it was banded and which is like way south of here) all the way up to the Marina District:
PORTLAND, Ore.— In response to a Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today designated 24,527 acres (38 square miles) of critical habitat to protect the Pacific Coast population of threatened western snowy plovers in Washington, Oregon and California.
“Protecting critical habitat will help this lovely shorebird continue on the path to recovery,” said Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist at the Center. “Species with federally protected habitat are more than twice as likely to be moving toward recovery than species without it, so this puts a big safety net between plovers and extinction.”
Western snowy plovers breed primarily on beaches in southern Washington, Oregon, California and Baja California. Today’s designation includes four critical habitat units in Washington (covering 6,077 acres), nine units in Oregon (covering 2,112 acres) and 47 units in California (covering 16,337 acres).
Snowy plovers were listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 1993, when the coastal population had dropped to 1,500 birds and plovers no longer bred at nearly two-thirds of their former nesting sites. That Endangered Species Act protection allowed the population to increase to more than 3,600 adults by 2010.
Plovers are recovering but still face many threats, including widespread and frequent disturbance of nesting sites by humans, vehicles and off-leash dogs; crushing by off-road vehicles; global climate change; pesticide use; and habitat loss.
The western snowy plover was first granted 19,474 acres of critical habitat in 1999. In 2005 the Bush administration illegally reduced the critical habitat to 12,145 acres, eliminating protection for thousands of acres scientists believed necessary for the snowy plover’s survival and abandoning key habitat areas crucial for recovery. In 2008 the Center sued over the unlawful reduction of the plover’s habitat protections, leading to a settlement agreement with the Service and today’s revised designation.
Today’s final rule includes the reinstatement of habitat areas identified by government scientists as essential that were improperly withdrawn in 2005; inclusion of some areas not currently occupied by plovers but important for their recovery; and addition of habitats such as back-dune systems in an attempt to offset anticipated effects of sea-level rise caused by climate change.
The western snowy plover is a shy, pocket-sized shorebird that weighs less than two ounces and lives for three years. Plovers forage for worms, insects and crustaceans in wet sand and in kelp that has washed ashore. The word “plover” is thought to come from the Old French”plovier” or “rain bird” because plovers were seen on sandy French beaches during spring rains.
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 375,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.”
Oh, and also remember that San Francisco is for Plovers:
