Ski San Francisco. Ski wax company trucks a bunch of snow into SF, dumps it on Fillmore St., skiers and snowboarders get air while others take pictures.
posted by planetkyoto
on Sep 30, 2005 -
23 comments
For lovers of the hard-boiled crime story, life began with the black bird. It's a tale of greed and a wisecracking gumshoe. The femme fatale is a liar. The object of the hero's search is a statuette of a falcon.
Published exactly 75 years ago on Valentine's Day,
Dashiell Hammett's private-eye novel "
The Maltese Falcon"' immediately won critical acclaim. And
when it was made into a 1941 movie starring
Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre (and directed by a
rookie), Hammett's story found a
worldwide audience and his hero,
Sam Spade, became a household name.
Now, three-quarters of a century later,
that's still the case. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 14, 2005 -
33 comments
Dogblog - Jon Sung takes us on a magical journey through San Francisco, and its many fluffy dogs.
posted by Simon!
on Jan 23, 2005 -
14 comments
Free TiVo. If you are an
American consumer and
live in the Bay Area, the TiVo company on Friday
will give away 40GB Series 2 recorders to Comcast customers who bring their cable bill and a gift for The Family Giving Tree charity to TiVo headquarters in Alviso, Calif. The giveaway will last from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., or until they run out of units, and will be limited to one recorder per household.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket
on Dec 16, 2004 -
22 comments
Due to temporary budget shortfalls, I find myself spending my Saturdays elbow deep in breadmaking.
Sourdough bread is perhaps one of the most primal forms of bread relying an an artificial ecosystem of
hundreds of different bacteria and yeasts to digest grain flours and produce gas. The souring of the dough has
complex effects on the flavor of the resulting bread and is necessary for low-protein flours such as rye. Free starter cultures can be obtained from the
friends of Carl who continue his tradition of mailing his culture to anyone who sent a self-addressed stamped envelope. You can buy
cultures from around the world, but if you want to live dangerously, you can cultivate your own by just using a mixture of flour and water relying on microbial flora growing on the flour. Sourdough in some ways puts the art of hacking
back into breadmaking because it requires a deeper understanding of what is going on beyond just throwing a set of dry and wet ingredients into a bread machine.
Which could explain why I'm still lucky to get something other than a brick. But like beermaking, the DIY satisfaction makes up for many flaws in the final product. (And on final edit, I can't get away with making this post without the obligatory link to the
sourdough faqs.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Jul 3, 2004 -
32 comments
Chicken John is quitting! (SanFranciscoFilter) It looks like the
Odeon is looking for new management. Does this mean the end of good/bad/scary performance art in SF, or is it just a new beginning?
posted by badstone
on May 12, 2004 -
4 comments
Flowers for all!!! "Today a coworker of mine had a thought to send flowers to a random couple waiting in line at SF city hall.
He called a florist and they agreed to do it. He told them to deliver to any couple -- it didn't matter who -- standing in line to get married, with his blessing. The card will read simply "With love, from Minneapolis, Minnesota."
Once they understood, they were very touched and thought it was a great idea.
He told another co-worker who did the same thing. And now we want to start a movement. Wouldn't that be cool if people from all over the country, gay, straight and otherwise, started sending flowers to the people waiting in line to get married.
Call it The Big Gay Bouquet call it Flowers from the Heartland. Call it whatever you want, but help us get this off the ground.
Call Flowers on the Bay at 888-217-9119 and order a bouquet to be delivered tomorrow at noon.
And Tell all of your friends to do it.
Because straight or gay, we believe and we know many people who believe, support and celebrate the right to marriage. And we'd like to show it. We'd like to see all of the people standing in line with flowers of support from all over the country."
Apparently, flower shops in San Fran are starting to get overwhelmed...
posted by matty
on Feb 19, 2004 -
42 comments
Graffiti Archaeology Pretty cool flash app that lets you view photos of the same walls in San Francisco over time, as the many layers of graffiti accumulate. To anyone that has ever ridden the Caltrain, a lot of these walls should look familiar.
posted by mathowie
on Dec 20, 2003 -
6 comments
Lesser of two goods? (SanFranciscoFilter) SFWeekly's John Mecklin sums up the wild ride in San Francisco's mayoral race, from Matt Gonzalez's
late entry, to the baffling
Guardian endorsement, to the obvious Chronicle
Gavin Newsom endorsement, to the downright surreal
Alioto endorsement debacle. Oh, and then there's the Chron's not so coincidental
"Shame " series on homelessness, Newsom's defining issue, in the final days of the election.
In all, Mecklin concludes we're pretty damn lucky to have the fortune in this day and age to choose between two candidates that both have the capacity to do a decent job. Is this relevant to non-San Franciscans? Well, if
Matt wins (and the odds are even), that puts a Green at the helm of a fairly important US city and may help counter the effect of Arnie.
posted by badstone
on Dec 4, 2003 -
33 comments
R.I.P. Bay Area Transit Information Page, 1994-2003. The site, started by two
Berkeley students, provided quick access to transit information in the San Francisco Bay Area, who later received funding for their efforts in 1996. Instead, it gets replaced by
this abomination of web design. On the other hand, it is
very unusual for a web site to
keep the same user interface over the span of almost a decade. Already, there have been
user interface rants,
complaints about not finding information,
sarcastic commentary, and a brief
eulogy delivered from one of the original creators, and it hasn't even been the first day. Is content over style dead or are information sites like
this (flash) the wave of the future?
posted by calwatch
on Nov 4, 2003 -
12 comments
Might as well jump. JUMP! An interesting article (nicked from
linkfilter) about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. Only 26 people are known to have survived the 220 ft drop into water 350ft deep. I have been across the bridge once and was "amused" by the fact that there is a free counselling phone as you get halfway across. Reading this article and realising the numbers involved, it suddenly seems less funny...
BTW, the jumper (who before he went a second time was one of the 26) protesting the Iraq War was discussed
here.
posted by jontyjago
on Oct 7, 2003 -
38 comments
This new film [25MB, QuickTime] documents the 3rd annual Bring Your Own Big Wheel race, in which a bunch of crazed fools raced headlong down San Francisco's
Lombard Street (aka: the crookedest street in the world) on Big Wheels. Good drunk fun! Here are some
pics for the bandwidth-challenged.
posted by scarabic
on Sep 30, 2003 -
22 comments
"We're walking from Chicago to San Francisco. Many have responded with, "
You guys are stupid!" Some, on the other hand, have said, "Wow, that's cool!" Either way, we hope you'll keep coming back to see what will happen next in our walking adventures."
Current mileage, photo galleries, and journal entries abound -- and really, when was the last time
you walked 627 miles (inside of 60 days)?
posted by wells
on Jul 24, 2003 -
20 comments
The wonderful online history journal
Common-Place is presenting a special issue entitled
"Early Cities of the Americas." Nineteen essays, each concerning a particular incident, person, place or encounter in the early life of a city, together provide a "worm's eye view" of what urban life was like in early postcolonial North and South America. Learn about vigilante justice and press sensationalism in 1856
San Francisco, or about a day in the life of a peasant family in
Lima of the 1760s. Other essays concern the 17th-century "treasure city" of
Havana, searching for salvation as a slave in 1647
New Amsterdam (New York), and capital punishment in colonial
Paramaribo, Suriname. "Reading these essays cannot but help readers gain some historical perspective on the modern condition," especially as you see how many of the issues we associate with modern urban life (poverty, crime,
bowling?) are not exactly recent developments.
posted by arco
on Jul 15, 2003 -
5 comments
Buddhism tames the amygdala Covered recently on Metafilter (
here), new research at the University of California San Francisco Medical Centre ( into the "Happy Buddhist" phenomenon ) shows that Buddhist meditation techniques
"can tame the amygdala, an area of the brain which is the hub of fear memory." [BBC] -Is this the Rx for a nation of Americans gripped by fear? Do Christianity, Islam or Judaism have effective techniques to tame the amygdala too?
posted by troutfishing
on May 22, 2003 -
48 comments
Hooters is coming to San Francisco Oh My,
Hooters, The ultimate in crass disgusting guy-ness and un-PC-ness is finally coming to San Francisco-the utlimate in PC-ness and "new-age-king-of-guy-ness." Will San Francisco be able to handle it? Granted the self-professed "slightly tacky yet unrefined" Hooters IS going into Fisherman's Wharf, which is tacky tourist-central. But, "it's about so much more than...that..." you know.
posted by aacheson
on May 20, 2003 -
52 comments
The
Gumball Rally 3000 is almost upon us. San Francisco to Miami in five days all in the spirit of the classic
movie.
With an entrance fee of $20k and A List celebs like Johnny Knoxville and Jason Priestly participating... Not to mention the
Bikini Bandits it's sure to be a wonder to behold. Starts at the
Fairmont today at 9. Be sure to say hi to the Hustler Honeys in their twin turbocharged Lamborghini....
posted by zeoslap
on Apr 17, 2003 -
22 comments
Who Is Frank Chu? A Craigslister put up an interview with various SF residents, and Frank Chu himself. For people not from the Bay Area, Frank Chu has been a
downtown fixture for some time -- notable for his silent protest of bizarre space-crimes committed by ex-presidents.
posted by hammurderer
on Jan 27, 2003 -
13 comments
Project 112 was a secret, cold-war era project to determine vulnerabilities of US warships to various chemical and biological attacks. While
lots is known about what happened, there's still a lot of information that hasn't been released yet.
In the early 1950s, the US Army
sprayed the bacteria Serratia Marcesens over San Francisco. While the government thought that it was safe, many people ended up checking into the hospital. One elderly man even died as a result of the US testing chemical and biological agents against it's own citizens.
posted by manero
on Jan 22, 2003 -
4 comments
Seamless City is a project made possible by proliferation of gigabytes of affordable disk space, digital cameras, photo composition applications, and a lot of time. Take a 30 mile pedestrian tour of
San Francisco.
posted by mnology
on Nov 20, 2002 -
8 comments
Banning hip-hop. Police in San Francisco control the kinds of music clubs may play and promote. In key parts of the city, rap music has basically been outlawed.
posted by xowie
on Oct 27, 2002 -
58 comments
