This week, the city's Planning Commission will be considering the application of Pollo Campero, the beloved Guatemalan fried chicken chain to take over the space of the old Payless ShoeSource on Mission Street.
Our sister blog, SFoodie, has written before about the underground dealers of the chain's chicken in the Mission District, driving boxes of the fried chicken up from the franchise in Los Angeles. Well, today we discovered yet another Pollo Campero dealer, Excel courier service at 24th and Alabama Streets, which actually flies the stuff in from Guatemala itself.
There is driving drunk and then there is driving really drunk. A Haight woman's night of good fun turned into a night in jail after she got wasted and tried to drive home, hitting six cars in less than a block.
The intoxicated woman was driving a convertible along Corbett Avenue near Market Street in the Upper Market neighborhood at about 9:10 p.m. on Sunday when she hit a 1997 Crysler, moderately damaging it. She drove off, but a witness ran after her and called police. As she continued down the street, she hit three more parked cars, police said.
By this time, other people in the neighborhood were chasing after the erratic driver, trying to get her to stop. The driver then circled the block and hit two more parked cars on Douglass Street. She stopped the car at this point, but only because she was wedged in between the two parked cars.
"She was drunker than a skunk," said Police Captain Denis O'Leary.
The day after Speaker of the House John Boehner called President Barack Obama's budget plan a job killer, the White House announced the president will be making a West Coast swing through the San Francisco Bay Area to address the one thing we really, really need: jobs.
The White House told reporters today that the president will be in the Bay Area on Thursday, although they wouldn't specify where and what time.
But he will be here to meet with high-tech industry leaders and talk about green-tech innovation and investment.
Muni boss Nat Ford on Monday praised Barack Obama for including $200 million in spending for the controversial Central Subway rail project as part of the president's federal budget proposal.
"The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency applauds President
Barack Obama's proposed budget, which includes $200 million for the
Central Subway and $30 million for Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit in Fiscal
Year 2012," Ford said.
Community Choice Aggregation Could be Offered to Just One-Tenth of City
We've reported in the past on the intractable problems -- both in design and execution -- of CleanPowerSF, San Francisco's ambitious plan to shift the city to a more eco-friendly power supply. The program, as initially conceived, risked foisting high electricity rates on many city residents who might not want or be able to afford greener energy in the first place.
CleanPowerSF, known as a "community choice aggregation" program, has faltered more than once in recent years. The latest development, as reported in the San Francisco Examiner and Bay Citizen last week, is that the city has failed again to find any power providers who say they can meet the program's goals. As a result, officials at the Public Utilities Commission say they will go back to the drawing board in an effort to mimic a similar initiative in Marin County that they say has been successful.
What, exactly, will that mean, and how will San Francisco's community choice aggregation program change as a result? We got some answers to those questions today from PUC spokesman Charles Sheehan. The foremost change, he said, is that CleanPowerSF will probably -- at least at first -- be dramatically scaled back, covering as little as one-tenth of the customers it had initially hoped to provide with greener power.
Leave it to the San Francisco Public Health Department to use Valentine's Day as a way to get people to not want to have sex.
Health officials decided to use this hallmark holiday to tell us the hard, cold truth about our Valentines -- they aren't so pure after all. As it turns out, San Francisco's sexual behavior has caught up with itself, and STDs are on the upswing.
Overall reported cases of chlamydia increased 10 percent last year -- with a 23 percent increase in white men alone. Gonorrhea rates went up 9.8 percent, and rectal cases among men increased by 6 percent.
If that wasn't enough to turn you off of sex tonight, here is another mood killer: Syphilis has sharply increased by nearly 30 percent, after a short-lived decline in 2008.
If you haven't read Will Reisman's recounting of his attempt to outwalk the 30-Stockton, you should -- it's nice that the Examiner is allowing its talented staff to express its creativity via a means other than unearthing novel synonyms for "criminal."
In any event, while Reisman didn't win his matchup with the bus line that has been the bane of his existence, it was still entertaining to read his blow-by-blow. And though the 30-Stockton rolled past Market one block ahead of a man on foot, that doesn't ameliorate the fact that this bus line -- and many other Muni routes -- are hideously slow.
A fun article that makes a salient point? That's a good thing. Just as it was back in 1998 when a pair of Chronicle scribes tested whether a pedestrian could outhoof the N-Judah (he did).
Police are investigating a suspected homicide on the 1000 block of Bush Street, where an elderly man was found dead inside an apartment.
At about 6:14 p.m. on Friday, police were called to the apartment to do a welfare check. When they arrived, they found the body of 67-year-old Jack Baker of San Francisco.
Police told reporters that there were obvious signs of trauma on the man's body, leading them to believe that the man had been killed.
An apparent prankster added a little twisted humor to the controversial debate over whether a PETCO store should move into the Richmond neighborhood.
Someone put up a poster at the vacant site where PETCO wants to move in, located at 5411 Geary Blvd., advertising the space as as a combo discount vet and taxidermy service. The poster was taken down over the weekend.
"One way or another you'll be happy with my work," the poster read. It included a
drawing of a 1950s-style man with a smoking pipe in his mouth.
Richmond bloggers note that the man's face pictured on the poster is J.R. Bob Dobbs from the Church of Subgenius, a religious group of "rebels and freethinkers" that satirizes and mocks organized religion.
What the hell?
For many San Francisco gay couples, Valentine's Day is just a bitter reminder of what they don't have -- marriage certificates.
So expect a huge turnout at San Francisco City Hall for the hallmark holiday today; gay couples across the nation will celebrate their love with a little civil disobedience.
Same-sex couples will line up at the county clerk's office and go through some of the same motions they endured last year, which is to apply for their marriage licenses, and get rejected.
It's much easier to take rejection when you already know it's coming. It's also a lot easier to organize a protest.
