I'm a lasagna boy!

Mission and 24th / Valencia and 16th

BART stations drew violence yesterday: at 24th Street, a youth wielding a machete (!! -- where had he concealed it? down his baggy pants?) chased a man off a Razr Scootr and around a truck parked next to the McDonalds. Other youth, perhaps a third party to the fray, threw filled bottles of beer noisily into the street as they drove past.
A few hours later, at 16th Street, a lanky young man kept sticking his head in the corner store and hollering crude obscenities at the shop-keeper. Eventually he goaded the shop-keeper into coming out of the store and assailing him, while he pretended to dial 911. A tattooed man came along and very calmly separated the two, while the instigator kept screaming obscenities interspersed with an imaginary conversation with the police.
And to avoid it all, we hopped into a cab. The hackie told us that we could go anywhere except where those rambunctious Tiburon folk were: someone had just shot a tollbooth operator on the Golden Gate Bridge

From little things big things grow

Container City's web site has an interesting FAQ covering the technical details of reusing shipping containers for such structures as housing, school buildings, and office space. Recently I saw Shigeru Ban's Nomadic Museum, designed to house a travelling exhibit of Gregory Colbert's "Ashes and Snow" photography exhibit.

For the Nomadic Museum, 148 empty containers are stacked in a self-supporting grid. Fourteen containers will be used to ship building materials; the remaining ones will be rounded up at the museum’s next port of call. “The idea came from the fact that these can be found in every place the museum will travel to,” says Ban. “I have not made anything new. I’m just finding a new function for them.” A tentlike fabric fills in the gaps between the containers and serves as the roof.

Oh no, Mr Yuk!

Childhood favourite Mr Yuk has jumped on the trendy silcone wristband bandwagon. The adorable and effective stickers punctuated my childhood.

Scott and Haight, Part II

Eastbound cyclists and skateboarders rarely heed the stop sign at the bottom of Haight, where the street meets Scott. Sometimes this has dire consequences. The car did not fare well, either. Three prowlers, two police motorcycles, two hook-and-ladder trucks, and one ambulance later, the cyclist was taken to hospital. He was at least alive: five years ago, I saw a cyclist receive severe cranial injuries at this same intersection.

Let's get multi-modal

It's not like we need the Transbay Terminal or anything. After years of ballot initiatives and endless wrangling by state agencies, San Francisco has no multi-modal transit center. The Caltrain depot features the most half-hearted attempt to bridge MUNI, requiring passengers to cross a freeway onramp to move between the N-Judah light rail and Caltrain heavy rail; downtown BART is two blocks from the ferry terminal; and BART and MUNI themselves rarely play well together outside of the Market St. subway.
So I don't care that the new Transbay is on hold (again).

The Client

On a rainy Saturday in Pittsburgh*, I raided a friend's bookshelf and came up with a comfortably worn paperback of John Grisham's The Client. I read it the rest of the day as I shuttled back and forth on the bus and subway, and came close to completion overnight while watching the time change. This morning, as I waited for a car to take me to the airport, I raced to finish the book: "Okay, 30 pages, about half an hour." I could so do that. And then I realised, as I turned the last leaf, that a sheaf of pages had dropped from the cheap glue at the end of the binding, and I wouldn't finish the page-turner. Undaunted, I figured that the newsstands at the airport would have the book, and I could stand quietly in a corner and discover how Grisham, never the master of the powerful ending, wound up this book (which is quite good: Grisham writes great legal thrillers, much better than Scott Turow). Frustratingly, the three shops at the terminal had almost every other of his books (really: the one on the ground floor had almost a dozen thick paperback titles by him).
I was totally foiled, stymied, thwarted. And by the time I get to the library, I'll have forgotten all of the exciting action of the preceding 75 pages.

* Not really in Pittsburgh; I just really like the phrase, from one of P.G. Wodehouse's wickedly humourous novels. I wish I'd been reading Wodehouse instead.

Catch-up.

I'm back-filling blog entries for the past week, when I was strangely without computer and / or 'net access. I read: Mole People, something which made Anna turn up her nose in disgust; visited a few zoos, including the Aquarium and Coney Island; risked arrest for reading about riding a bicycle; and took it easy.

One hot week pays for all

It's true: I have left San Francisco and moved to Portland to be my own boss. Hell yeah. (Thanks jimg for the link!)