In this year's iteration of an annual ritual, hundreds of workers and beneficiaries of the public agencies and nonprofits that serve San Francisco's needy mobbed City Hall on Friday.
They all hoped for a chance to speak at a special Budget and Finance Committee hearing to voice outrage about Mayor Ed Lee's $3.4 million in funding cuts affecting 23 nonprofits that serve the poor. Call it Alms Day, in which nonprofits that serve the poor go begging to city fathers.
"Stand up, everyone who supports what I'm about to say," Community Housing Partnership executive director Gail Gilman said as a kickoff to an hours-long session in which potential commenters packed the Board of Supervisors chambers, snaked halfway around the inside of the block-sized building, and filled an additional hearing room to watch the proceedings on video. "Supportive housing is the most effective solution to homelessness. Restore cuts to Health and Human Services."
U.S. Airways' decision to kick a football player wearing sagging pants off one of its planes in San Francisco is provoking the ire of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which says that the move was racist.
Deshon Marman, a black college football player, was ordered off a plane docked at San Francisco International Airport last week after a flight attendant objected to a rather severe level of pant-sagginess that was allegedly "below his buttocks, but above the knees." (A difficult region at which to maintain your pants, to be sure.)
Earlier this month, we told SF Weekly readers about Anthony Josef Norris, the San Francisco art mentor for youth who confessed to having child porn. Apparently, his love for pornographic images seeped into his artwork as well.
Police told reporters today that Norris' one-inch tiles within his murals, displayed at various schools, are embedded with "inappropriate and offensive images." The images were found at Sunset Elementary School on June 15, according to police.
"I think as an adult, you would look at these tiles and see, possibly,
some sort of sexual connotation to them," Commander Mike Biel told reporters.
Muni isn't the only malfunctioning modern-day necessity that threw us off schedule this fine Friday. Turns out more than 6,000 PG&E customers were without power after an outage swept the eastern part of San Francisco -- including SF Weekly's newsroom.
Our apologies for delivering this news so late.
The outage hit at about 11:40 a.m. after a car crashed into an electric pole at the corner of Leavenworth and Filbert streets, says Tamar Sarkissian, spokeswoman for PG&E.
"Sorry for the outage on your work day," she told SF Weekly.
A front-page story in today's San Francisco Chronicle trumpets the news that Pride has whittled its debt down to $77,000 heading into the weekend's festivities. Sounds great -- in the two months since our cover story breaking down how the massive gay and lesbian festival and parade systematically marched itself to the brink of financial disaster, Pride has paid down some $83,000.
Pas mal, pas mal. But the story doesn't answer the question one most wants to know: Has any of this changed the minds of influential city supervisors who have adamantly stated that Pride must be wrenched away from the nonprofit that's run it for the past 40 years? Here's the short answer: No.
Bevan Dufty, the former supervisor and mayoral candidate, told SF Weekly that he and his campaign manager, David Feighan, "parted ways" this week. Eager to be mayor, Dufty has already hired a new campaign manager who will start in two weeks.
Dufty said there were no hard feelings between the two; he just wanted the campaign to go in a different direction.
"My needs were different," Dufty says. "He is not working with me, but he has endorsed me and contributed to me."
Aaron Sorkin, we hope you're paying attention to this. By all accounts, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who say Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea while at Harvard, were ready to drop their legal battle against Facebook on Thursday and accept the $65 million settlement they were awarded in 2008.
And how's your Friday going?
Slowly, if you're a purveyor of Muni. A malfunction with the system's signal loop -- which allows trains to enter automatic mode in the Metro Tunnel -- has led to snail-like trips in light-rail vehicles.
Muni spokesman Paul Rose said calls came in about 5:30 this morning regarding the problem. Crews continue to investigate the source of the malfunction. Trains are currently navigating the tunnel in manual mode -- i.e. slowly.
In the past, trains' sander hoses -- which pour sand on the tracks to aid braking -- have severed the signal loop cable. That has been ruled out in this case, however.
Finally, how slow is slow? It took your humble narrator 45 minutes to traverse from 18th and Church to Duboce and Church this morning. Doing the math, that's six-tenths of a mile in three-quarters of an hour, or 0.8 miles per hour. By comparison, a snail moves at only 0.03 miles per hour. So Muni isn't actually moving at a snail's pace. It is, however, moving more lethargically than a spider.
