When the ancient Polynesians invented surfing, they often used a paddle to help them navigate. Fast-forward a few millennia, and Stand-Up Paddleboarding, or SUP, finds itself trendy again. Part of its increasing popularity is that standing upright allows surfers to spot waves more easily and thus catch more of them, multiplying the fun factor. Paddling back to the wave becomes less of a strain as well. The ability to cruise along on flat inland water, surveying the sights, is another advantage. Finally, it’s a good core workout. If you’re sold on the idea, schedule an intro SUP lesson, free with board and paddle rental, and you may find yourself riding the waves like a Polynesian king.More
Many of us remember coming home from our elementary schools with freshly glazed pinchpots, cups, or whatever else our young imaginations could conjure up. Saturday mornings at the Randall Museum can bring that memory back, or create a new one for the youngsters. Ceramics make great gifts — especially on Mothers' and Fathers' Day. Hop on board for the Randall's once-weekly class, and for $6 and two weeks to have your work fired and glazed, you'll have all the materials you need.More
December is almost over - the New Year is coming up and everyone is busy drying off from the rain or holiday shopping. Let's take a look at what's happened this month.
We've all had that day: the one where you accidentally hit "Reply All" on an email intended for one or get rear-ended as you're backing out of the veterinary clinic where you've just spent your life savings to find out that the results on your cat's blood work are "inconclusive."
PostedByJoe Eskenazi
on Mon, May 18, 2009 at 5:50 PM
Joe Eskenazi
Supervisor John Avalos (foreground) and MTA CEO Nat Ford eloquently and cordially talk past one another at today's surprise meeting
Every lawyer dreams of a Perry Mason finish to the case. But, in the non-televised world of law and order, very rarely does a witness break down on the stand and bellow, "All right! I did it! I did it and I'm proud!"
Along those lines, Supervisor John Avalos probably wasn't expecting Muni boss Nat Ford to accept the District 11 supe's proposed revenue measures and service restorations to the Muni budget on bended knee when Avalos led 30-odd transit activists on an impromptu march from the City Hall steps to MTA headquarters on Van Ness and Market. But surely Avalos was hoping for more than he got -- Ford noting he felt tomorrow's Board of Supervisors' meeting was not the time to discuss Avalos' plans to inject roughly $15 million in parking revenue into Muni's budget while staving off service cuts, and a promise from the Municipal Transportation Authority CEO that he'd merely stay in touch. For, you know, the right time to talk about Avalos' plans. Whenever he feels that is.
Avalos frustratedly walked out of an MTA conference room in the exact same position as when he walked in: He's still desperately trying to find a pony buried in the mounds of horse excrement that is the MTA budget and he hasn't gotten any assurance from Supervisor Sophie Maxwell -- the critical swing vote -- that she'll back him up when he proposes tomorrow to vote down that $766 million budget. Without Maxwell, it doesn't figure he'll get any help from Board President David Chiu, who has been excoriated in progressive circles for the "compromise" budget he brokered last week; Chiu and Maxwell are like Love and Marriage in this deal -- you can't have one without the other.
When you can't muster up enough votes from the San Francisco board of supervisors, it sometimes helps to create drama. In that spirit, supervisor John Avalos led a march of about 30 people from City Hall this afternoon to the MTA headquarters, where he demanded to speak with MTA CEO Nat Ford.
"I told him I was going to talk to him," Avalos told the SF Weekly online news editor, Joe Eskenazi, who is caught in the supposedly impromptu ruckus. "I didn't tell him I was going to do it this way."
Avalos wants to avoid Muni fare hikes and budget cuts, and apparently he wants to talk to Ford about it. Right now. The group had initially entered the MTA office and loudly made their demands, and the rumor is that Ford, whose office is on the seventh floor, is eventually going to come down and humor then. Until them, Avalos and his followers have been relegated to the outside to wait.
More to come from our editor on the street, Eskenazi.
Gorenman, a Russian computer engineer, was just 26 years old when he met then-teenage McIlvenna and her friends, a group of attractive, bisexual teen girls whom investigators dubbed throw-aways. The girls had come from broken families and had been living on their own, stealing and "milking" men to support their drug-addled lifestyles. On the Sunday night in 2004 when they randomly met Gorenman while driving around, it seems that the plan had been to rob him. Instead, after he followed the group out to Fort Funston, a remote and windy beach locale in the southwest corner of San Francisco, one of the girls shot him in the head.
For her part, McIlvenna says she knew nothing of the gun or a plan to kill Gorenman. She says she only intended to milk him. Although McIlvenna's story has its holes and contradictions that certainly call for skepticism, by the end of my interviews with her at the jailhouse, I had sympathy. It'll be interesting to see how she fares with Dateline.
PostedBySteve Elliott
on Mon, May 18, 2009 at 12:59 PM
stopthedrugwar.org
In a big victory for medical Marijuana patients and advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear an appeal by San Diego and San Bernardino counties challenging the validity of California's medical Marijuana laws. But in a case of cruelly ironic timing, also today, a federal judge in San Francisco sentenced a Lake County medical Marijuana grower to 10 years in prison.
According to Bruce Mirken of the Medical Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), today's Supreme Court decision removes the last obstacle to medical Marijuana ID cards being issued to qualified patients throughout California. Nine counties have refused to issue the state-mandated cards, often citing the San Diego/San Bernardino lawsuit as a reason.
"We expect all nine counties that have delayed issuing cards to start following the law immediately and stop putting patients at needless risk," said MPP California policy director Aaron Smith.
This decision leaves intact the rulings of California's state courts, which held that state medical Marijuana laws are entirely valid despite the federal prohibition of Marijuana.
Monday, May 1810:30 a.m. - City Operations & Neighborhood Services
The entertainment commission goes marching one by one
Hurrah, hurrah
The entertainment commission goes marching one by one
Hurrah, hurrah
The entertainment commission goes marching one by one
These entertainment resolutions will never be done
And they all go marching down!
Through committee
Where they continue to be debated
Boom boom boom ...
11: a.m. - Public Safety Committee
Supervisor David Campos has called for hearings on the "Public safety impact of budget cuts proposed by various departments."
I'm guessing no one at this hearing will be happy
PostedByJoe Eskenazi
on Mon, May 18, 2009 at 11:01 AM
What's my name?
"What's in a name?" may be the most overused Shakespearean phrase of them all. But bear with us -- it's warranted this time. For while Juliet notes "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," she doesn't go so far as pushing that roses (or dingleberries or whatever we'd call them) should have no name whatsoever.
That's where Frank Vuono comes in. The Chief Operating Officer of the San Francisco-based United Football League told SF Weekly that, as recently as April, the league actually planned for its franchises to have no names. Keep in mind, the UFL's unique first-year template calls for its four teams to play in seven cities -- so if you just went by cities, that which we call cumbersome by any other name would still be just as onerous. Not much spare room on the scoreboard for the New York/Hartford/Orlando vs. San Francisco/Sacramento game, is there?
"Until we had real owners for each team, we didn't want to have names for the teams before an owner came on board. So now we have owners on board," said Vuono, who confirmed this happened "just recently." By the way, not only is Paul "That Paul Pelosi" Pelosi one of the league's initial investors, he's the lead investor for the San Francisco team. What's the name of that team? That's yet to be determined. While we noted last week the "name that team!" function was still up and running on the UFL's Web site -- and Vuono confirms the league is still looking for team names -- the Web page's submissions section appears to have been discontinued as of today. (Hope they got some good suggestions; Vuono wasn't too impressed with SF Weekly's offering of "The San Francisco Values.").
PostedBySteve Elliott
on Mon, May 18, 2009 at 9:30 AM
Princeton.edu
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent call for a debate on legalizing Marijuana in California (as a means to increase state tax revenue) has re-ignited the long-running controversy around pot's effects on health. Predictably, both sides are waving the studies which support their positions, and major media outlets are looking for some reasonable middle ground.
The debate was pushed further into the limelight by yesterday's Sacramento Bee article which attempts to give a balanced view of the conflicting studies on the issue. And while there undeniably are many studies on both sides of the Marijuana divide, it's important to not let an even-handed attempt at fairness obscure some very obvious conclusions which can be inferred from the results so far.
First of all, it is not true that "we don't know much about Marijuana." Since the late 1960s, Marijuana has been one of the most heavily studied substances in human history -- and there is a distinct lack of any "silver bullet" finding which could conceivably justify the herb being illegal.
PostedByJoe Eskenazi
on Mon, May 18, 2009 at 8:30 AM
Joe Eskenazi
Ed Delmon
Ed Delmon has been working in the liquor biz since he was a 14-year-old in 1951, pedaling a bicycle through the Marina delivering hooch from Demartini Liquors on Chestnut Street.
When asked if his former place of business is still there, Delmon laughs to the point he induces a coughing fit and blurts out, "No, no, my God, no." But he's still here -- for now. Delmon, 72, has served as Maker's Mark bourbon's "diplomat" (that's what it says on the business card) for San Francisco for more than a dozen years. Now he's decided that it's time to whiskey-a-go-go, and he's personally choosing his successor. And, yes, it could be you.
Delmon's job ostensibly takes him from Fresno all the way to Crescent City, though he manages to spend around 70 percent of his time right here in San Francisco (he still lives in the Marina, where he was born and raised). He drives around 25,000 miles a year attempting to get every bar, restaurant, or store that sells top-shelf alcohol to push Maker's Mark -- and keep the brand in the outlets he's already won over. Last year he organized 91 bourbon events -- "they don't just fall out of the sky, y'know?" -- though he notes that such events "are not a blinky-loud-girls in short dresses kind of thing. We don't hire models to go around and give shots away. This is not a Jägermeister approach -- not that there's anything wrong with Jägermeister, they've chosen to market themselves that way. But we go for a more subtle approach." (Still interested in the job? Click on the jump for more).
PostedByJoe Eskenazi
on Mon, May 18, 2009 at 7:30 AM
The SEIU's spurning of wage concessions entitles Gavin Newsom to be as nasty as he wants to be
Twenty-odd years ago, a frenetic outdoor expert addressed your humble narrator's Boy Scout troop. At one point, while wildly gesticulating, he tossed us a hypothetical: "Okay, you're lost alone in the woods; it's cold out and you've got no food or water. What's the worst thing you can do?" He was taken aback by the smartest kid in the troop's instantaneous answer: "Die." Of course that's the "right" answer, even if it isn't "correct." Sometimes the results of our actions can be far, far more dire than anyone predicted.
All of which leads us to the SEIU Local 1021's disastrous vote last week to spurn a meticulously worked-out concession deal -- that still would have awarded city workers a 3.75 percent raise. The aftermath of this sorry tally was to immediately punch a $38 million hole in the city's already woeful budget numbers. But, for the union workers -- and, one could argue, for the constituency they serve -- the effects were arguably even more dire. It allows Mayor Gavin Newsom the chance to begin dismissing SEIU people with the abandon of Cosmo G. Spacely -- and to do so with the public's understanding and even blessing. Simply put, city folk fighting to maintain employment of any sort (or not) aren't going to shed a tear over the departure of city laborers who turned up their noses at a raise (you can read the full text of the SEIU's spurned deal here; I have a sinking feeling many of the union voters did not bother to do so).
What an epic miscalculation. For whomever Gavin Newsom is (and we're not sure, we really aren't) he's not a man to spare the whip when harsh behavior suits him. Lay off 1,000 or so members of a progressive-aligned union whose arrogant behavior potentially infuriated many ostensibly sympathetic San Franciscans? Wow, twist the mayor's arm!
The site of Helen Canafax's fatal mugging, 680 Folsom Street.
Appealing to the empathy of a mugger or a killer may be a low-percentage operation. Appealing to someone who fears that mugger or killer may be a better bet -- and the San Francisco Police Department and family of Helen Canafax are hoping to guilt anyone who saw the 63-year-old San Francisco woman's April 10 robbery into coming forward. Their strategy: Noting, repeatedly, that this was a woman who spent her life helping the less fortunate -- and didn't deserve this.
Helen Canafax
Several weeks after having her hip broken when a mugger attacked her from behind, Canafax died of a pulmonary embolism. The city's medical examiner hasn't yet made a ruling on the cause of death, but both the police and Canafax's family are maintaining that the fatal blood clot wouldn't have occurred if the Potrero Hill resident hadn't been badly wounded in the purse-snatching.
"Helen always took time to work with people who didn't have much: Food, money, blankets, clothing -- that's what she did," said her brother, Cole Canafax. "After the incidnet, I told her that I thought this was a guy who was desperate, violent, has done this before and will do it again. She said, 'I don't know, Cole. He may have needed the money for his family.'"
Sub Pop recording artists 'clipping.' brought their brand of noise-driven experimental hip hop to the closing night of 2016's San Francisco Electronic Music Fest this past Sunday. The packed Brava Theater hosted an initially seated crowd that ended the night jumping and dancing against the front of the stage. The trio performed a set focused on their recently released Sci-Fi Horror concept album, 'Splendor & Misery', then delved into their dancier and more aggressive back catalogue, and recent single 'Wriggle'.
Opening performances included local experimental electronic duo 'Tujurikkuja' and computer music artist 'Madalyn Merkey.'"
