Presumably, this crime fighting squirrel operates in a similar manner to Disney’s 1989 series Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, wearing a little outfit and solving crimes within 24 minutes. Come to think of it, this sounds adorable and I’m not sure why anyone would object.
The person behind the red crayon has some explaining to do: why do you hate SFPD’s squirrel? Is there a specific beef you have with this squirrel? We deserve answers.
If you answered the latter, I’ve found the perfect parking spot for you! Over Halloween, a new demonic parking meter appeared at the corner of 18th and Oakwood.
It’s a great place to park your vehicle if you made the unfortunate mistake of driving to Dolores Park, and don’t mind committing your very own soul to endless torment while you buy wine and cheese from Bi-Rite for your sunny afternoon picnic.
Assassins. Seems like they’re everywhere these days, murdering it up. So for Halloween this year I made my own modern-style Assassin’s Creed costume.
The white hoodie is pretty much standard as far as assassins go these days. The felt patch on the hood is a tribute to Connor Kenway’s patch in AC III. It’s clipped on with safety pins.
And for good measure I’ve got dual hidden blades.
My hidden blades use a pair of telescoping drawer sliders from a local hardware store. The “blade” is made from a freebie paint stir stick painted gray. It’s held to the slider with fishing wire.
For the wrist straps I bought some old belts at Goodwill, cut them down to size, and bolted them to the opposite side of the slider. I glued a couple excess pieces of belt to this side for extra grip.
The blades pop out with a flick of the wrist and can be held in place with a finger.
And of course we have an Apple of Eden. You can’t really call yourself an assassin if you don’t go around collecting artifacts from the First Civilization, so I made this one by dremeling out the lines in a styrofoam ball and painting it.
The apples vary from one game to the next, this one’s more or less like the one Ezio found in the second game.
And that’s all there is to it! If you spot anyone dressed as a Templar, please let me know.
Before Red Bull reached American shores in 1997, there were no “energy drinks” on our store shelves. Not knowing what we were missing, we went about our daily lives content with plain old coffee, tea, and soda. Hard to imagine that only 17 years ago, your local liquor store didn’t have an entire shelf dedicated to Red Bull, Rockstar, Monster, and 300 other beverages, each more foul tasting than the last.
But it wasn’t a sudden transition. A year before we had Red Bull, Coca-Cola introduced Surge. In both look and taste it was like an alien version of Mountain Dew. Similar amount of caffeine, similarly artificial flavor, but dyed slime green instead of neon piss yellow.
Around the same time Pepsi countered with the incomprehensibly marked Storm, another lemon-lime flavored soda that was also caffeinated — sometimes. This confusion caused more than its share of caffeine withdrawal headaches and it was dropped in 2000.
Coca-Cola is selling Surge again in limited quantities through Amazon in twelve packs of 16oz cans. I was able to get my hands on one of these rare shipments of Surge just before they sold out. Technically you can still find this neo-Surge online, but it’s from hoarders trying to resell the stuff at 20x the price. (Never underestimate the power of nostalgia.)
So, how does it taste? Pretty gross, actually — and exactly like I remember. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish this retro soda so I can stay up all night playing Nintendo 64 while listening to the Stone Temple Pilots.
The other evening while waiting for a train, I decided to write an intentionally terrible rap song about a relationship gone sour due to irreconcilable differences. Here it is in all its glory:
You ride Muni and I ride BART That’s why we’ll always be apart I like the Giants, you don’t like baseball There’s no chance we’ll get along at all You smoke pot, and I, crack The differences between us are a fact
[chorus] I say “SF” but you say “Frisco” The only word that rhymes here is “disco” At first I liked you, you made me feel at ease Until I found out you still like Thee Oh Sees Our differences are tall as Sutro Tower I give you zero stars like Michael Bauer
I live in the Mission but you’re in West Portal My love for you will never be immortal Your startup is funded, I’m at the loan shark We’re as unnatural as Golden Gate Park Sorry baby but we have to disband I’m flat broke, I’m moving to Oakland
Local backpack and messenger bag company Mission Workshop appears to be moving to the old Therapy Furniture spot on Valencia at 16th. But here’s the interesting thing: their old store on Rondel is right behind the Valencia location.
Here’s a map (original) that I’ve colored for you. Mission Workshop’s new location is in orange, the existing one’s in green:
So the old and new locations share a common wall. If they wanted to — and I should stress that no building permits have been filed as of today — they could bust out some axes and make one huge store. It’d be like a hipster version of Jack Nicholson in The Shining:
“Here’s, uh… John Oliver?”
In the end, I can’t really bring myself to say anything too snarky about this particular change on Valencia. It feels like a step sideways; Therapy’s furniture was well made but pricey. Same caveat for Mission Workshop’s bags. At least we can emit a collective sigh of relief that it’s not another overhyped, overpriced eatery.
UPDATE: Mission Workshop sent me an email confirming that All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy the new Valencia storefront indeed is connected to the original Rondel location via a shared wall. Of course if you’ve been to the store (it opened recently) you already knew this.
Since opening day Moscone West at 4th and Howard has been adorned by a large black rectangle on the side of the building. Careful observers might notice that this rectangle is attached to a somewhat rusty track that goes around the entire building. Soon, this rectangle will be removed.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
When the building was first proposed in the early 2000s art firm Diller and Scofidio (now Diller Scofidio + Renfro) was hired to develop a public art element. And design they did. Their piece is called Facsimile. It was intended to show images of inside the conference center intermixed with playful videos of life in the surrounding hotels as the screen moved back and forth across the track. While it’s certainly an interesting design, that design never quite translated to the real world.
SF Arts Commission voted to remove Facsimile on September 8th partly due to ongoing maintenance costs associated with preserving the non-functioning art. But if the Bay Area can’t get a piece of technology to work, it’s probably broken beyond repair.
UPDATE: Walked by Moscone West the other day, and it appears they finally got around to removing the black rectangle.
For the past year or so, schizo rants similar to the one above have occasionally graced utility polls in downtown San Francisco. Exactly who is putting these up is unknown — the person in question has access to office supplies and seems capable of formulating grammatically correct sentences, which rules out many of SF’s best known colorful eccentrics.
So while it’s an amusingly bizarre read, it’s also a bit sad that the person behind this appears to be in the early stages of losing their grip.
Here’s the full text of the unhinged rant:
You are being influenced with remote-based computer programmed conversational skits when (1) you talk to yourself excessively with imaginary persons, (2) the discussion is with supervisors, friends, or famous people (for better influencing impact), and (3) it seems like you can almost feel what the other person feels like.
How it is done: Each person’s natural & distinct electrical cerebral emissions are assigned human tracking numbers. Our emissions are then constantly attached to thru usage of tracking medium (such as radiowave) which also has an open channel for transferring speech into and from our heads (i.e., our emissions are thus used like a transistor inside a radio – chip implants are not needed). Computers, programmed by operators for conversational manipulation, are at the other end of the tracker medium where our tracking numbers, name, sex, family members, likes, dislikes, and, all of our thoughts and statements are recorded. Libraried conversational skits, are applied into our hearing reception centers. Web query: Mind control and US Patents (beware, many sites include speculation).
Those of our leaders who are still with us and the law, are too manipulated to have sufficiently met and conferred on how to stop this; otherwise they would have informed us of more facts on the topic. WE MUST PUT OUT THE WORD and make this crime more public to enable the leg work by leaders necessary for a solution that entails the cessation of our manipulation.
The above photo is a newspaper box at the 16th Mission BART plaza, which recently received a makeover. Who needs a boring black box when it can have a painting of what appears to be a girl on Mars pulling constellations out of the sky? More newspaper boxes should be this rad.
(Note: If you know who painted this, please do get in touch so I can update with proper credit.)