I'm a lasagna boy!

An engaging conversation

Stopped in at the Casa Jender-Vollrath for some merriment and house-warming. Little did I know that Pete (Mr Full-of-Wrath) had given Jen the biggest engagement ring ever.

It is a luxury sky-box!

Would you want to live on a roof? Perhaps not atop NYC public housing, but in Berlin it becomes an appealing possibility.
Here in San Francisco, perennial mayoral candidate and all-'round rabble-rouser Jim Reid may have a sympathy vote in his campaign to provide miniature earthquake shacks for the homeless (who don't seem interested). Reid was recently evicted from his house for contructing a prototype.

It's the heat, not the humidity.

Something about this morning in the 'hood was fraying my nerves. I went out for a ride early in the AM, stopping for a cup of coffee on my way out. While I was pedalling past the beautiful mural in the Duboce Bikeway with the steaming coffee in one hand, I turned to get past a sleeping drunk. Just a little coffee splashed over the edge of the cup and all over my nice grey sweatshirt. It only takes a little to stain. That's twice in one week.

Later in the day, I was walking across the idiotic roundabout at Waller and Steiner. Two uniformed SFPD riding bicycles cut through the roundabout, neatly coming within a few inches of hitting me. I yelled at them, but they didn't stop. Mere seconds later, at the intersection of Waller and Pierce, a squad car stopped southbound on Pierce, and then forcefully turned east onto Waller, where I was already well in the intersection -- and quite nearly a hood ornament on car 1100. I hollered after the cop that he almost hit me, generalizing that cops were jerks. He agreed and sped onwards.

I rang 415 553-0123, the SFPD non-emergency number. Dispatcher 98 advised me to call the Park Station (415 242 3000), where I spoke with a desk commander; he calmly pointed out that police officers have more things to do than show courtesy towards pedestrians.
I suppose he's right, although these incidents both took place within a few feet of where a tully-loaded prowler pulled me over four years ago, and took my licence, preparing to cite me for cycling without lights. Just as one of them was whipping open the ticket-book, a call came over the radio; the officer literally threw my ID back at me, hopped in the car, and said, "Lucky for you we've got bigger fish to fry!"

Is it worth complaining about police procedures and officers? I haven't had a single positive encounter with SFPD in the years that I've lived in the Lower Haight: they've responded adequately to calls regarding neighbourhood violence, people passed out next to the house, but tend to ignore pedestrian- and bicycle-related calls. I've been hit or nearly hit by cars many times while riding my bicycle, and not a single time have the SFPD actually caught or pressed charges against the vehicle driver (Golden Gate transit operator; private car; that irritating post-ballgame incident last year right outside the Hall of Justice). Now I just wonder about the roundabouts and the recklessness they engender.

Sprout sprouts.

Much as I love Sprout (and sometimes wish that he weren't one nut short of a Tour de France win), there's no way I would go to the weird Pet Sematary lengths of cloning the cute lil' kitty. Some other people would:

"It's almost like creating a family tradition," she said. "We love our dogs so much. If at some future point my children thought back about Akeya and wanted a dog like it, they'd have the opportunity."

Speaking of opportunity,

"We would have had to be dumb not to see a business there," said Genetic Savings CEO Lou Hawthorne, a longtime family friend of Sperling, who suggested they turn the project into a for-profit venture.

Before and after

From the DPT:

Bicycle volumes on Valencia Street during the PM peak hour increased 144 percent, from 88 to 215 bicyclists per hour. The "before" data were collected on "Bike to Work Day" in May 1997 when an entire southbound motor vehicle lane was closed for cyclists. In March 2000, 215 bicyclists were counted on a typical weekday. Given that more cyclists traditionally ride on "Bike to Work Day," the increase in bicyclists is most likely even greater than these numbers indicate. During the "after" count, motor vehicles were also counted to determine the modal split (percentage of motor vehicles versus bicycles). Comparing total motor vehicles to bicycles made up 16 percent of the vehicle traffic along Valencia Street.

Workers own the means of production

... but the production is mean: Bolsinga works for the man, the man capitalizes on his work, and Bolsinga has a sincere sense of satisfaction:

I'm responsible for that. I fixed ONE BUG that they said HAD TO BE FIXED, or they wouldn't buy those Macs. 1200*1500 = $1800000.

Let the beatings continue until morale improves!

Oh, the places you'll go

Through the online service World66, I created a map of places I've travelled (alas not many: two continents, North America and Europe, plus one trip to the Maghreb):

The map casts me as more worldly than I am: I haven't seen the Northwest Passage, nor Hawai'i; I haven't been to Perpipgnan, although I have passed through Monaco (by rail from Marseilles). While I've visited Barcelona on several occasions, I've never walked the streets of Sevilla.
Justin keeps a list of flags for each of the countries he has visited.

Maximize your browser window over at mile x mile: view Chicago's beautiful blocks, many of which I've ridden down. Many years ago, Mark Athitakis and I mused over an escape-from-the-ivory-tower journal of writings about Chicago. The first issue, now lost in the thicket not quite west of the Dan Ryan, might have contained an article on "What to Eat at Each El Stop", an essay on the long-dormant Jackson-Inglewood El line, and a history of 55th Street seen through the bifocals of the University of Chicago's planners and their collusion with Chicago's Urban Redevelopment Authority.

Subways of the world, unite and take over

Subways to scale, but not (yet) including BART.

I like being part of the crowd on MUNI in the mornings; seeing people stream on and off the trains invigorates me (and makes downtown San Francisco feel more vital).

Assess signal timing?

One of the most physically challenging intersections for cyclists and pedestrians is the apparently simple intersection of Fell and Masonic.
The hazards come partly from the lack of visibility for cars heading west (left-most lane of Fell St.) turning south onto Masonic: the broad intersection (five lanes by four lanes, plus parking) allows for at-speed turns; and partly from traffic heading crosstown on Masonic, timing lights between Haight and Geary (it is possible, although very difficult, to drive white-knuckled straight through from Haight, the first traffic signal, to Pine -- at which point you're as good as downtown). These hazards make the simple crossing extremely nerve-wracking.

To add insult to injury, this intersection cuts through the middle of a park, and the crosswalk is part of a multi-use trail.

The lame addition of a "Yield to Peds and Bikes" sign about 18 months ago hasn't affected the speed of turning traffic -- they don't see the sign until they're in the turn -- and the crosswalk doesn't have a dedicated "Walk" phase.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition have posted their endorsement.

If you can't say anything nice about someone ...

The best way of losing a cause is to abuse your opponent and to trade upon his weakness.
You assist an administration most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil administration never deserves such allegiance.
-- M K Gandhi, Mahatma, the Great Soul

Some of the debate really centers around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free. I'd strongly disagree with that.
-- Geo. W. Bush, President of the United States of America, 13 April 2004

There and back again

It's been a while since I had any seafaring adventures. I picked up a copy (signed first-edition) of Caroline Alexander's latest, The Bounty. The story of Capt Bligh and the Bounty has long fascinated me, and now I'm learning new details:

May 1 brought an extraordinary diversion: two sharks were caught and in the belly of one was found a prayer book, "[q]uite fresh," according to Lieutenant Clark, "not a leaf of it defaced." The book was inscribed "Francis Carthy, cast for death in the Year 1786 and Repreaved the Same day at four oClock in the afternoon." The book was subsequently confirmed as having belonged to a convict who had sailed to Botany Bay in 1788 with the first fleet of prisoners consigned to transportation.

RTFM(anual).

A few weeks ago, I found a chromed Diamondback BMX street bike lying in the street behind a Chinese restaurant in San Rafael, with a sign reading "Free Bikes" taped to the top tube.

Done.

Today Lupe was learning me on manuals, bunny-hopping, and scuffing (the latter on his bike, which has a front brake). After about an hour, we retired to the café for lunch; lo and behold, just as I pulled up to the door the brake cable snapped.

Of course, none of this coolness was at all apparent when I walked into a meeting with a fresh mug of coffee, sat down in a comfy conference-room chair, and found out that the back was broken. I fell backwards, and the coffee spilled all over my hoodie and trousers.

If you have a cookie-cutter, I've an urban planning project for you

San Francisco's monumental Mission Bay project boasts more lofts -- 6,000 units -- than Alphabet City or Docklands, but more than half of all retail will be chain stores.

Building a city neigbourhood, especially one from scratch, poses great challenges to developers. How to seed the area with enough retail that urban dwellers will feel engaged? Does a neighbourhood feel like a 'hood if it's got the same stores one would see at the other end of a BART line? At the other end of a plane ride? If Lofty Q. Public comes home to San Francisco one evening and home looks like Phoenix, will Lofty throw himself in front of the convenient MUNI or CalTrain?

On the other hand, Jackson park callsitself a neighbourhood and now boasts a Wal-Mart on its main drag. Doesn't get more cookie-cutter formulaic than that. And then again, some places don't care for individuality: Jose Montaner, a Cuban refugee living quietly and cleanly on a city-owned island hurts the posh attitudes of his neighbours, who perhaps can't see because of the mote in their eye. They want him out (and a Wal-Mart in?).

Barcelona is doing this with Barceloneta; London with Docklands;

April 12, 2004
MIAMI JOURNAL

A Paradise of Detritus (Plus Ducks)
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, April 11 — No one was home but the chickens, so the visitors could only peer like Hansel and Gretel into the mysterious makeshift home on the tiny mangrove-tangled island. They walked gingerly back to the dock, so as not to collide with the bedraggled stuffed animals, bright lobster buoys, faded flags, rusty buckets and shiny CD's swinging from the trees.

Then he appeared: a small, stooped man of 70, paddling his weathered dinghy with a pointy-eared dog at his feet. Having checked his crab traps, the man, Jose Montaner, was back for another evening of breeze-kissed solitude on this tropical island, a few hundred yards from mainland Miami, that he has claimed as his own.

"Hola, muchachos!" he said, and offered up a tour of his compound: two jury-rigged structures with roofs of striped tarpaulin, a yard teeming with chickens and a few ducks, a well-groomed beach with views of the downtown Miami skyline, and every salvageable item to wash up on this city-owned island since Mr. Montaner, a homeless Cuban-American, quietly took it over four years ago.

Here are the neat piles of coconuts that float from Key Biscayne, from which Mr. Montaner has lovingly coaxed green sprouts. There is his flip-flop garden — a collection of lost sandals delivered by the tide — and his tree with a battered shoe outfitting every branch. The playground with tire swings, the lean-to where he watches a generator-powered television by moonlight, and the place he calls home: a kitchen and a bedroom built of crude wooden planks, decorated with religious statues and cozy as a child's treehouse.

Take it all in, because Mr. Montaner and his possessions might not be here much longer. A movement is under way to evict him from the island, one of five created decades ago with dredge spoils from the construction of Dinner Key Marina, a few hundred yards away. Some boaters have complained about Mr. Montaner, and while city officials are sympathetic to his plight, they say he has no right to inhabit public land.

"I thank the Lord every day for this place," Mr. Montaner, who speaks only Spanish, said on Thursday, easing into a wobbly kitchen chair on his beach. "Are they going to leave me here, or are they going to throw me to the wind?"

His allies — and there are many among the small-craft boaters who launch from the marina — say Mr. Montaner is not only harmless but also an exemplary resident of Coconut Grove, a lush, affluent section of Miami where some of its original pioneers settled. Some of the neighboring uninhabited islands are blanketed with garbage, they said, while Mr. Montaner keeps his spotless.

Stuart Sorg, a Coconut Grove resident and member of the Miami Waterfront Advisory Board, sees the situation differently. He wants Mr. Montaner off the island immediately, especially after reading in The Miami Herald last week that Mr. Montaner had been arrested for minor crimes in the past. "We've got to go through that island and disassemble everything," said Mr. Sorg, who has complained about Mr. Montaner to city officials. "This city has become too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan for that type of thing."

Mr. Montaner's island sits in sight of Miami City Hall, surrounded by the marina, a restaurant and Shake-a-Leg Miami, which teaches disabled people and poor children how to sail. Shake-a-Leg sailors like to visit Mr. Montaner and explore his hideaway, as do members of the Coconut Grove Children's Environmental Group, who clean the other islands and look to his as a model.

Asked how he got here, Mr. Montaner waved his arm dismissively. "It would take many books," he said. He was born in Caibarien, Cuba, where he was a carpenter and boat builder and was jailed, he said, after stealing milk for his family. In 1968, he said, he set sail in a fishing boat for Key West, ending up in Miami and, later, New York City.

He worked there as a parks maintenance man and salt spreader until, he said, "I couldn't stand the inhuman frozen conditions and I needed to come back to the tropical paradise that reminds me most of Cuba."

Back in Miami, Mr. Montaner lost a job because of an injury and became homeless, he said. He lived in shelters and abandoned buildings until he discovered the island, where he collected detritus for a month before building his house in a single day.

His routine is steadfast, Mr. Montaner said: rising at 4 a.m., making his beloved Cuban coffee on a propane burner and listening to Radio Mambí, a popular Cuban-American station. By 6, he starts his daily cleaning, traversing the long, skinny island to collect whatever washed up overnight. He rakes seaweed, checks his crab traps and feeds his birds, which provide him with eggs.

After dinner — rice and beans that friends bring, or groceries he has picked up from the mainland — Mr. Montaner watches television for two hours before turning in at 9 sharp. To get to sleep and stave off chronic back pain, he drinks a homemade brew of fermented mangrove root.

Audrey Eckert, a Miami police officer, said there had been an outpouring of concern for Mr. Montaner, and someone had even offered to give him a houseboat.

"That way he can enjoy his island, continue to visit it, but he just can't live on it," she said.

Mr. Montaner said the only thing he could not bear would be a forced return to homelessness on the mainland. He would love to stay on the island until he dies — or at least until Fidel Castro, just a few years his senior, does.

"Then it's a whole different story," he said, staring over the water as if to see his other tropical island, and Caibarien, at last.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

... is for death, said she;

Today is (yet another) Easter Sunday, as my neighbour Mark pointed out, by way of explaining why the 'hood was so eerily quiet. Does this mean that sales of bauhaus' "Stigmata Martyr" are going up on eBay? Don't kid youself.

Let the voters speak.

If ballot measures and propositions can pass by narrow margins, eventual second-guessing shouldn't come as a surprise.

So why is the public outcry over Pier 39 redevelopment, Central Freeway / Octavia Boulevard (re-)construction, and Golden Gate Park Concourse demolition such a surprise? Bitter words and legal action surrounds all three, even after public opinion, committee meetings, and acrimonious votes.

California's system of ballot propositions brings democracy into false consideration. Rather than allowing only policy experts and civil servants to solve problems, uninformed, rabble-rousing, and reactionary public groups must be heard. Does this make participatory politics useful? From the reaction to the Octavia Boulevard plan, no; ditto the Garage under the Concourse; ditto the new retail development at Pier 39.

The problem is that by putting the vote before the public, the apparent seal of approval is placed on the project yet the actual constituents don't decide the fate of their local resources. Did the residents around Octavia Boulevard, and those people who actually use the Central Freeway, make the decision?