And now, the latest salvo – if you’re an earnest Yelper who feels that Drs. Hiura & Hiura have been treated unfairly in the whole SFMTA Polk Street Parking Space Removal Plan, well all you can do is post a five-star review, you know, to help out:
Except that this doesn’t help – the last thing that Hiura To The Power Of Two or Yelp need is a political debate carried out on Yelp.com.
Speaking of which, here’s something new from the Hiuras themselves:
I’m confused – whom’s this video for? IDK. Is it for patients so they’ll post five-star reviews? Or is it for potential patients? But who’s going to see it? (And who’s that woman in front of the green screen? Are we meant to think she works there? IDK.)
And I’ll tell you, at this point, no YouTubers have seen this video, like literally nobody.
Hey, did you see that storefront in the background of this clip? Look at all that metal security grating! That’s a reminder that this is Polk Gulch – an area that’s still “in transition,” as they say.
Oh, did I write Polk Gulch? What I meant to write was “Polk Village,” as that’s what some millionaire small-biz owners tried to rename the area a few years back. (I’m not sure how that turned out – certainly, I haven’t heard that term in a while.)
In any event, all that grating sure would be helpful if you’re ever battening down the hatches, like in preparation for another San Francisco Giants World Series riot, or if you were expecting ever more unwelcome visits from the StreetsBlogSF crowd, right?
Well guess what, the hatches have been battened – that means that the Hiuras no longer have anti-SFMTA propaganda posted in their window and the iconic red PEOPLE LOVE US ON YELP storefront sticker – well, that’s now gone as well, almost as if the Hiuras don’t want transit activists thinking of this bidness and the Yelp at the same time.
*OMG, these people use so many buzz-phrases and “framing” words, I wonder if they’d even be able to translate their NewSpeak into regular English. Let’s have a try here, an “improvement” as any change that SFGov has ever made and/or something that it wants to spend tax or fee-payer money on, whether that change turns out to actually be an improvement or not IRL. And a “complete” street is one that has had tax or fee-payer money spent on it recently, as best I can figure. IRL, Polk Street was “completed” about a century and a half ago, right? And an “investment” is any spending done by SFGov, like the way my cousin used to invest his money at the slot machines inside the big airport in Vegas. Hey, how would a cosmetic surgeon propose to “improve” your body? How could s/he “complete” yourself? IDK, an “investment” in breasts implants? Hey, that’s what you should do, you should give me your money and you’ll be lifted and enhanced. Except sometimes that’s a bad choice, and other times it’s a meh choice, like whatever. And certainly, your life wasn’t “transformed,” as promised by those who literally make money off of selling an idea that may or may not be a good idea. Hey, is the SFMTA all about safety? Oh, Lord no, not really. IRL, it’s an inefficient organization that makes some good choices but also some bad choices in the name of “safety,” that’s what it is. Oh well.
And I distinguish between reviewers who have brand-new accounts with just one review vs. reviewers with longer histories, and I thought Yelp sort of did as well, but no, they’re all gone.
So, what will end up happening is your hard-earned, hard-to-get 5 star rating will come down a notch or two, or three, if you sign your John Hancocks to a letter like this – the blowback will be a brace of one star reviews from noncustomers.
The Grand Battle of Polk Gulch is well and truly joined.
[UPDATE: I’ve omitted Stanley Roberts’ video from this post as I mistakenly thought it was new as of this week when in fact it was posted almost two years old now. My apologies, Stanley. As you can see, Mr. Roberts goes after everybody (including fake monks and nuns) and certain people at the SFBC have been irritated by that over the years.]
Now part of that’s due to “churn,” which is something that every organization has to deal with, but most of it has to do with behavior of the SFBC itself. I’ll tell you, I’ve been riding bikes around town longer than the current SFBC has existed – no, I’m not saying that I’ve been here since the “early 70’s,” I’m saying that the SFBC didn’t really exist in the 1980’s when I came to SF. I’m saying that before Critical Mass (and its predecessor, the “Commute Clot”), the SFBC didn’t really exist – they were nowhere, man. What _did_ exist, a little later on, was the car-centric Willie Brown Administration. And all those functionaries working for Willie Brown were trying to find some “bicycle people” to cut a deal with, to tame Critical Mass, to give grant money to. But no, all the Critical Mass leaders were saying stuff like, “Critical Mass doesn’t have leaders, Man.” Eventually, the SFBC managed to practically become a part of the SFMTA, you know, conducting surveys for SFGov, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in taxpayer and feepayer money, forcing companies like Twitter to deal with the SFBC, you know, officially, and, in return, the SFBC stopped promoting Critical Mass, and SFBC now offers pols a nice photo op every year on Bike to Work Day and it actually endorses (without consulting the Members at all) for election Willie Brown protegees like, I don’t know, Ed Lee, for example. So that’s the history, and during this history I’ve seen the SFBC grow in membership, from “over 1000″ to “over 5000″ to “over “10,000” and then “over 11,000″ and then “over 12,000″ and then, uh oh, back down to “over 11,000″ and most recently back down to “over 10,000.” What are the numbers now? IDK, 9000-something? The SFBC isn’t exactly candid about its recent loss in membership. The SFBC certainly doesn’t want people freely looking at its tax forms or its older webpages, so that’s why it recently started suppressing this kind of information. Mmmmm… I’ll tell you, of course, there’s been a huge increase in bicycling in San Francisco since I’ve come here, and for various reasons, fine. (It’s sort of funny about how the big annual jumps in cycling came exactly during the rise of the fixie craze, and exactly when the Bicycle Plan injunction froze all infrastructure changes, but whatevs.) I’ll ask you, why can’t a monomaniacal advocacy organization like the SFBC concede anything? I guarantee you that the SFBC people who went the extra mile to “reach out” to Stanley Roberts of KRON-TV are pissed off about the above video coming out right before the Big Vote on Polk Street, which is supposably [what, no red underlining for a word I purposefully misspelled? Amazing] coming March 3rd, 2015, but who knows how that will work out. I’ll tell you, IMO Polk Street is a triple beam lyrical dream the way it is now. What are the other options to go north south in the area? If I don’t take Polk, then I’d be thinking Stockton, Grant, Kearney or the Embarcadero to the east or, to the west, Steiner (it’s sort of the pass over Pacific Heights, sort of) or Arguello through the Presidio. In your efforts to pursue your goals, SFBC, which I don’t necessarily oppose, you go too far and you end up alienating people like me, a man in his 40’s, and even older people such as Junior the Bike Messenger, and, apparently, THOUSANDS OF OTHER FORMER SFBC MEMBERS.
And I thought, what an odd thing to say, but yeah, I can see where that comes from.
(Here’s just one example – this place is a member. Like, it even gets promoted by the GGRA.)
Anyway, the GGRA spends its time doing things like lobbying against simple letter grades for restaurants, ala San Diego. Which is funny, because posting simple letter grades up front has lots of benefits – like it lowers food poisoning incidents at ER’s in the surrounding area and other good stuff like that. Check it:
“A 2003 study by two economists [Yay, Stanfoo!] found that after letter grades were introduced in Los Angeles, there was a 20 percent decline in hospital admissions for food-borne illness.
Here’s part of it – let’s start with the beginning of the alphabet
Arizmendi Bakery 1331 9th Ave. 08/28/2014: Unclean hands or improper use of gloves (Score: 73)
Ouch. If I were Arizmendi, I’d spend more time striving to get a triple digit score and less time working on buying a “parklet” from the City.
And hey, who’s in charge of AT&T these days? Is it Olympian Larry Baer? I think so:
AT&T – Cable Car Bar (Promenade) [146520] 24 Willie Mays Plaza 09/14/14: No hot water or running water (Score: 93)
AT&T – Say Hey Sausage-Room 5319 [145157] 24 Willie Mays Plaza 5.15.01 09/14/14: High-risk food holding temperature (Score: 93)
AT&T Park – Food Cart 24 Willie Mays Plaza 09/14/14: Sewage or wastewater contamination (Score: 93)
AT&T Park – Garden Table Stand 24 Willie Mays Plaza 09/14/14: High-risk food holding temperature (Score: 93)
AT&T PARK – Gotham Kitchen 24 Wilie Mays Plaza 09/14/14: Unclean or unsanitary food contact surfaces (Score: 91)
AT&T PARK – Hearth Table Stand 24 Willie Mays Plaza 09/14/14: High-risk food holding temperature (Score: 93)
And yet, all the scores appear to be similar? I’m sure there’s a reason for that, but I don’t know the reason. (Are some of these violations no biggee? I don’t know. Which violations are important and which are less so? IDK.)
There’s lots I don’t understand about how SFGov does it restaurant health grading. Oh well.
Hey SFGov, can we get simple, effective letter grades posted out front, ala San Diego? Oh no, you just don’t feel like it? Oh what’s that, the GGRA doesn’t want you do it so you won’t?
San Francisco Sidewalk Steak – My buddies and I were walking up to the side door to Lucky River Restaurant at 700 Monterey Boulevard in San Francisco for lunch on Friday, November 21, 2014, and we saw this guy tenderizing or trying to break apart frozen meat. Yes, that appears to be frozen, raw meat that he’s slamming on the sidewalk. Maybe it’s what makes their Mongolian beef taste so good? Would you eat here after witnessing this?
“I want to leave, but it’s already 1am and we are both too afraid to leave our locked room. We get 4 hrs or interrupted sleep (the walls are paper thin and the doors have cracks in them), pray that we didn’t get exposed to tuberculosis, hepatitis and/or herpes and book it out of there. Trust me folks, this place isn’t worth the $60. I’ve stayed in $15 hostels while traveling though Europe that were both cleaner and safer than this place.”
And there’s this:
” If you have less than $150 night for a decent place to stay, youre actually safer just camping at golden gate park than any of these SROs…”
