For someone wearing a pearl necklace and an evening gown fashioned out of a Snuggie, a woman standing near the entrance to Rouge nightclub was pretty mouthy.
"Snugger, please," she told a guy in a Snuggie wizard costume, who had seemingly just refused to buy her a drink.
An abundance of Snuggie-clad gentlemen continued to hit her up, though, as this was Friday night's Snuggie Pub Crawl. About 200 people had gathered on Polk Street in some semblance of the Snuggie, a sleeved blanket that recently took over America with its unintentionally hilarious infomercial.
Many had spent hours bedazzling, trimming, and refashioning their Snuggies for the blanket-inspired costume party. Snuga-jawea and her friend, the Snugador (Matador + Snuggie), showed up. So did Lady Snug-ga (Lady GaGa in Snuggie). There was a distinguished Roman soldier, and an Alice in Wonder-Snuggie, plenty of wizards, and a dude who had merely decorated his Snuggie with the letters "DUKE SUCKS".
Ever-obsessed with the never-ending trend, TV news crews and print reporters also descended on the Snuggie Pub Crawl, though I'll have you know I was one was the only member of the media to actually don a Snuggie. (I think I still have the right, after being among the first to spot this trend at the SF Weekly office back in January.)
Still, I didn't feel taking notes through giant, fleece sleeves, and it's sort of hard to walk while wearing a blanket, so I threw the Snuggie over my shoulder and took the first opportunity to wrap it around eccentric 12 Galaxies protester, Frank Chu, who never misses an opportunity to be featured in the news.
The pub crawl, which started at 8 p.m., was one of 18 scheduled around the United States between January 30 and May 23. Central organizers in Chicago are doing the marketing and whatnot, and have posted all Snuggie Crawl info here: www.snuggiepubcrawl.com.
But ever resourceful, the Missionites had adapted the box from a mere means of newspaper distribution to a piece of post-modern urban furniture to listen to the evangelical singers on the corner by 12:30 p.m.
The misplaced box even started to attract tourists.
And skateboarders.
By 1:40 p.m., it even held an impressive twig collection. An interpretation of our cover story on foraged food, perhaps?
By 3:30 p.m., the saga was over. The box had been hauled away, leaving a lonely cavity in the lineup of newspaper boxes on the corner and a burning question in our mind about who hates us THAT much. Update: As of 9:40 Monday morning, the box had reappeared on the corner.
Photo credit: Francisco Barradas and Lauren Smiley
interesting to hear him speak live, as I've only heard sound bites, so
I don't have any expectations."
In 2006, the Ethics Commission's staff devised an ordinance calling for elected officials who vote upon city contracts of $50,000 or greater to report this within five days to the commission; this rule was meant to spot any "pay for play" where those awarded contracts would, in turn, donate to the elected officials making those decisions. The Board of Supervisors approved the ordinance by a 10-0 vote; six of those Supes are still on the board. Then, last year, Mayor Gavin Newsom placed Measure H on the ballot. This initiative, which essentially affirmed and expanded the ordinance, was overwhelmingly approved.
So it may come as a bit of a surprise that, while scads of contracts exceeding $50,000 have been approved by the mayor's office and Supes, neither has ever made the mandatory filings to the Ethics Commission.
But that's okay. The Ethics Commission has never bothered to enforce this section of the ordinance. Executive Director John St. Croix told SF Weekly he hasn't enforced it since last fall "unofficially," but went "on record" with a Dec. 31 letter sent to dozens of city elected officials telling them not to bother making their filings - which virtually none of them were doing anyway. St. Croix said the law was cumbersome and unenforceable. In this he may be correct -- but it's still a curious accusation considering it was generated by his own staff before being affirmed by the Supes and 61 percent of the city's voters.
the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before
we could actually get out of the building." Aha! You see? Rudy knew the twin towers were going to collapse before they collapsed!
Actually, it warrants mentioning that many people knew the towers were going to collapse before they collapsed -- the emergency personnel who frantically tried to radio the firefighters within to get them out, to no avail. In fact, it has been well-documented that, since the radios used by New York emergency workers didn't broadcast between departments -- or function at all within steel skyscrapers -- the firefighters did not receive the frantic maydays to get the hell out of the North Tower before it collapsed.
These problems existed all the way back in 1993, when terrorists blew up a car bomb beneath the World Trade Center. So Giuliani can't claim he didn't know about them. But he did nothing.
That may be cause for some sort of citizens' call for justice. Or, on the other hand, you could believe that Rudy Giuliani, a man who couldn't even win his battle with the Brooklyn Museum of Art over a dispute centering around shit-smeared sculptures, was the kingpin in an international conspiracy to kill thousands of Americans and wreak billions of dollars of domestic damages.
The tin foil is on aisle three, boys.
Photo | Marc N
