From the “broken mirrors abandoned on the street” file. 17th Street at Treat Avenue. Lunchtime last Tuesday.
Pirate Cat
21st and Florida streets, the Mission, San Francisco. I like the sign. Who wouldn’t. There was a chalkboard on the sidewalk in front advertising “Maple Bacon Latte.” If it’s a caffeinated beverage, it’s a flavor I haven’t yet sampled. I’ll go in and find out next time.
I happened to be walking by this corner because I fell asleep on BART–an old trick I have that dates back to days and nights on the Illinois Central in Chicagoland–and rode past my usual stop at 16th and Mission and wound up at 24th. It’s happened once before since I’ve worked at KQED, and maybe I should make it a habit. The walk from 24th is immensely more interesting and pleasant–more life in the neighborhood, less of a feeling of a place that’s been pounded flat by poverty, crime, indifference and desultory redevelopment–than the one from 16th Street. Such are the impressions of the work-bound walker, anyway. You need to sleep in a place, hear the street noise at night, spend a while seeing who’s going where during the day to get even the faintest sense of a neighborhood.
Air Blog: Takeoff Moment
We took off from San Francisco yesterday in weak sunshine, with lots of clouds left over from Sunday’s rain. Heading north and east across the Bay, the clouds billowing up to the west, out toward the ocean, were beautiful. I did what I normally do from my window seat: reach for my camera, advisories to keep electronic devices off notwithstanding. When I tried to switch it on, the screen said, “Change the battery pack.” Damn. So you’ll have to take my word for it: a long line of what looked like low, low cumulus rising up along the spine of the Peninsula, shrouding the ocean side and leaving the bay side clear.
Freeway Moon
Last night, Kate called me at work to say I ought to get out and see the moon rising. I agreed. I walked out of the office and up a steep stretch of Mariposa Street to a spot with an open view to the east across U.S. 101. There was a rising moon and lots of traffic. My camera’s just limping along these days, but this is actually a pretty good impression of the scene.
Who Are These Goons?
A handbill posted on a lightpole at 16th and South Van Ness. The list of suspicious circumstances got me.
Have you recently experienced any of the following:
- “Lost” mail? “Wrong numbers”?
- Dust bunnies? Flies on the windowsill ? Dead moths?
- Tooth aches? Interrupted sleep? Invalid passwords?
- Rearranged possessions? (Your belongings not where you left them?)
- Mismatched socks? Zippers not working properly?
- Odd damage or small stains around your house?
- Theft and sabotage of your food or kitchenware? Appliances behaving strangely?
- Cabinet and drawer handles held on by screws repeatedly loosened ARTIFICIALLY?
- Opened caps on items such as deodorant & food containers being retightened excessively?
- Do you hear sirens? Customers in a store filing into line just as you’re about to check out?
- Itching?
A reader notes (thanks, reader!) that it’s worth visiting the site of The Jejune Institute, noted on the poster as the suspected perpetrator of this harassment. (And if you’re thirsting for further Jejune knowledge, see the Yelp reviews.)
All Star Hotel
On 16th Street near Folsom in the northeastern corner of the Mission. I walk by the place at least two or three times a week. The setting says “dive,” but it’s surprisingly un-divey-looking from the outside. On the strength of two reviews, TripAdvisor.com ranks it 179th out of 248 hotels in the city. Room rate quoted in one of those reviews: $150. A week. Here’s a 2004 piece on the hotel from the alternative online news site BeyondChron.com.
(When I took the picture, a guy on the sidewalk said, “You with the movies?” I didn’t I’d heard him correctly and asked him to repeat what he’d said.
“You making a movie?”
“No, I just liked how that doorway looks.”
“If you’re making a movie, I want to be in it.”
“OK–I’ll be back when I’m making one.” We both laughed. )
‘Please Help Me Find Him’: The Resolution
A couple of days ago, I wrote about seeing a particularly eye-catching missing persons poster in the Mission. It appeared to involve a promising young science student from San Diego. So: I did call the numbers on the poster. The home phone had an answering machine in Spanish — the only thing I understood was the family name, Trujillo.
The listed cellphone was answered in Spanish by a man. I asked whether he spoke English. “Yes — who’s this?” He asked. I explained I was calling from San Francisco and had seen the poster. He said, “I already found my son. Everything’s OK. He’s back home and back in school — everything’s OK.” I was tempted to press him for the circumstances that led to him posting the flyer. I did manage to ask whether anyone else had called with information after seeing the poster. But he was clearly a little uncomfortable–speaking English and talking to a stranger–and I let it go. Anyway, that’s the outcome. A happy one, I’d say, and I’m all for happy endings.
Bay Area Storm Numbers
The storm came, and now it has gone, mostly. It was advertised as the marriage of a Gulf of Alaska storm and some typhoon remnants. Watching the rain pour down here, and seeing the totals mount on the National Weather Service statistics pages, I believe the typhoon part. It was the heaviest mid-October rain for most locations since 1962, when the World Series–Giants and Yankees, at the still-new Candlestick Park–was washed out by rain.
Some of the more amazing 24-hour totals, midnight Monday to midnight Tuesday: Mount Umunhum in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 13.07 inches. Ben Lomond, Santa Cruz Mountains: 10.58 inches. Mining Ridge, a remote recording station at an elevation of 4760 feet in the Santa Lucia range above Big Sur: 20 inches even. The totals of 5-plus inches at lowland locales in the central Bay Area seem semi-arid by comparison–even though they represent anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of what those locations get in an average rain year.
It’s not easy to get apples/apples numbers just casually browsing the Weather Service sites. But the service did publish a record report for 24-hour rainfall (the standard here is from 5 p.m. to 5 p.m., I think).
| Location | New Record | Old Record |
| Kentfield | 6.14 | 4.20, set in 1957 |
| Oakland Museum | 3.86 | 0.37, set in 1988 |
| Richmond | 3.38 | 2.47, set in 1962 |
| San Francisco Airport | 2.64 | 2.62, set in 1962 |
| San Francisco Downtown | 2.49* | 1.80, set in 1962 |
| Santa Rosa | 2.74 (tied) | 2.74, set in 1962 |
| King City | 1.65 | 0.30, set in 2007 |
| Monterey Climate Station | 2.66* | 1.14, set in 1962 |
| Salinas | 1.05 | 0.39, set in 1992 |
| Santa Cruz | 3.16* | 2.49, set in 1957 |
*New unofficial record for 24-hour rainfall in October.
For several days before yesterday’s storm, the Weather Service office in Monterey was highlighting some of the highest October rainfall totals for stations in its forecast area. Here they are:
| Location | One-Day Record | Two-Day Record |
| Santa Rosa | 4.67 (10/12/1962) | 7.41 (10/12-13/1962) |
| Napa | 4.66 (10/13/1962) | 9.32 (10/12-13/1962) |
| San Francisco Downtown | 2.29 (10/15/1969) | 3.72 (10/12-13/1962) |
| San Francisco Airport | 2.62 (10/13/1962) | 4.56 (10/12-13/1962) |
| Oakland Airport | 4.53 (10/13/1962) | 5.85 (10/12-13/1962) |
| Livermore | 2.17 (10/13/1962) | 3.45 (10/13-14/1962) |
| San Jose | 3.22 (10/13/1962) | 4.56 (10/12-13/1962) |
| Santa Cruz | 3.15 (10/20/1899) | 3.35 (10/20-21/1899) |
| Monterey | 1.80 (10/26/1907) | 2.09 (10/26-27/1907) |
| Salinas | 1.50 (10/30/1982) | 1.50 (10/30-31/1982) |
| King City | 1.88 (10/29/1996) | 2.18 (10/29-30/1996) |
Source: National Weather Service, Monterey, California
‘Fight the Anti-Worker Capitalist Agenda’
A couple of days ago, a young woman came down the aisle of my car on BART as we neared the Civic Center station. She was dropping postcards on empty seats. Strangely, she wasn’t handing them to any passengers. Maybe this is why: One of my fellow passengers picked up one of the cards, scanned it, and started to laugh. His companion said, “What’s so funny?” “Nothing,” he said. “Crap.” Then he tore up the card and discarded the scraps on the floor. Even here, the region some people would unhesitatingly dub the furthest left in all America, it’s hard to win people over to the fight against the anti-worker capitalist agenda.
Sky
So the Friday evening walk to the ferry to meet Kate often–usually–starts with a hike up the west side of Potrero Hill. Once, it was probably a working-class area; the older homes are modest in scale, mostly, and the heights are surrounded by old industrial and warehouse neighborhoods on the edge of the Mission, the south of Market area and (a new one to me) the Dogpatch district on the eastern flank between the hill and the Bay.
Anyway, I go up the west side, usually, and down the north side and then wind my way to the Embarcadero and the ferry slip. The bonus of the walk, which generally takes about an hour,, is everything you see along the way. Tonight, I hit the street just as the sunset color was coming on. I thought, “Ah, it’ll fade by the time I’m up the hill.” But it only got more intense. Above is the view from the upper part of 18th Street, looking down over the Mission. What an evening. End of summer. We’re just a week out from the equinox.