The
Chevron Corporation has exposed its pestilent underbelly by hiring
William J. Haynes II, a Department of Defense attorney who compiled
lists of violent interrogation techniques for shadowy
By Lauren Smiley
So much for $20 tucked in a greeting card from Grandma. Army Street Bingo is hoping Santa (well, at least a jolly Superior Court judge) will deliver a surprise worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As in our story this week, the police have denied bingo permits to eight San Francisco non-profits that run fund-raising games at the bingo hall on Cesar Chavez for 2009, citing multiple violations of the law. With the clock till January 1 ticking, and no answer yet on whether police will overturn the denial, the bingo hall's landlord is now demanding that Superior Court intervene to save the games.
Wednesday morning, the San Francisco Community Service Center (the official name for the hall better known as Army Street Bingo) filed a writ of mandate in the court asking for a last-minute injunction on the permit denials. The injunction would allow the non-profits to continue holding games legally in the new year until the matter can be heard in court.
By Peter Jamison
Transporting a collection of books, records and periodicals that purportedly surpasses 1 million volumes is no small feat. Imagine doing so on a litter-strewn block in one of the city's worst neighborhoods, dodging local toughs and zig-zagging wheelchairs at every step, and you've got the case of McDonald's Bookshop owner Itzhak Volansky.
Evicted from his cavernous Turk Street shop earlier this month by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation,
Volansky is supposed to already be gone. (TNDC gave him the boot over
unpaid rent; the amount is in dispute, but Volansky admits it was at
least $10,000.) At McDonald's on Tuesday, however, the scene was a
grossly magnified version of the typical college freshman's dorm room
on the last day of school. Books lined the walls and littered the
floors. It seems improbable that Volansky is actually going to clear
out his inventory before TNDC loses patience.
The good news is that he may not have far to go. Volansky said yesterday that he plans to open a new McDonald's Bookshop just a block away, at 120 Turk St, in a commercial space that he owns. The venue is smaller, But McDonald's Part Deux should still offer a fix for bibliophiles inclined to spend hours grazing through vintage erotica, obscure sociology texts, and the various other outlands of the literary universe that Volansky offers his clients.
But they may have to wait. "It's going to be awhile," Volansky tells SF Weekly,
before he opens the new store. One downside, he adds with a smile, of
the one-block move: "It's not going to be as nice as this beautiful
part of town."
By Benjamin Wachs
There's lies, damn lies, and then there's the stunt that Gavin Newsom and Heather Fong just pulled.
Silent Fong's supporters are going on about how SF's top cop is retiring on her own terms, with dignity - but the problem has always been that her dignity came at the expense of law enforcement in San Francisco...and nothing could illustrate that better than the way she chose to leave.
According to the timeline now widely accepted:
• Fong told the Mayor over a month ago that she would leave in April.
• Last Wednesday, she attended a joint meeting of the city's Police Commission and Public Safety Commission - where she told the city's two most important law enforcement boards that she would be a partner in a proposed massive reorganization of the police department and promised to oversee long-term changes.
• On Saturday, she announced her retirement on Gavin Newsom's radio show.
What does this mean? It means that when the city was trying to have a crucially important conversation about the future of law enforcement in this town, the Chief of Police and the Mayor were withholding vital information from the people who needed to know it most.
By Joe Eskenazi
The Partridge Family bus notwithstanding, not everything
about the 1970s trumped today's world. Everyone wore polyester - and smoked - a
combination that could very well turn you into The Human Torch. And yet, after one lit himself ablaze (or, as both my parents managed to do,
independently, immolate the back seat of the car via a poorly tossed cigarette)
you could count on your call to the paramedics going through. Clunky as they
are to the modern eye, Sgt. Pepper-era phones were built to last.
Those young enough to have never watched childhood images of
themselves placed beneath the dial of the rotary phone cartwheel to and fro as
they placed a call probably don't remember this, but, prior to about 1980, one
didn't buy a phone - you leased it from the phone company. In many ways,
telephone technology has pushed the limits of human imagination; we're fending
off commercials these days for products that are higher tech than the stuff
Kirk and Spock used on Star Trek. But,
now that phones are a standard consumer item, planned obsolescence has kicked
in. If manufacturers figure you're going to upgrade in a year or two, there's
no need to build a phone that'll last much longer - in fact, it'd be
counterproductive. Not so in the olden days. Rotary phones were constructed to
outlast their owners, and many of them have. Dotting the antique and curio
stores throughout the city, they've taken on new lives as exotic vestiges of a
bygone age.
