Month: June 2021

Any resemblance between the opening of this video and the credits from a seventies TV show about an Amazon superhero are purely coincidental.

I don’t have an online collection of the exact set of pictures from the art exhibition I participated in, but some of them are in this set. The theme of the show was “Heartbreak,” and it was tied to a poetry collection. There was a ton of cool art and a live poetry reading. The worst poem of the night: My terrible haiku. A total “no honey, yours is beautiful in its own special way” moment.

Galco was one of the places we bought the drinks for our wedding. We had dozens of different crazy drinks, including Radar O’Reilly’s favorite: Grape Nehi.

Handy Market is an old-school grocery store with a big meat counter in the back. On weekends they fire up a big smoker in the parking lot and people line up for hunks of meat.

Okay, folks: you should go donate now. The Los Angeles LGBT Center and San Francisco AIDS Foundation will be very grateful. http://tofighthiv.org/goto/ga2so

If you live in San Francisco (or as the locals call it, “Sani DiFranco”) you know the signs for the 49 Mile Scenic Drive, but you’ve probably never done it.

Everyone enjoys a paraphrased Wikipedia page

The first scenic drive didn’t have an official name. It was a car tour of the city set up for FDR. After that the San Francisco Down Town Association came up with a 50 mile drive, but that quickly switched to the current 49 Mile Scenic Drive name. Why 49? To link it to the Forty-Niners.

Just make it more confusing, the 49-instead-of-50 Mile Scenic Drive is 46.9 miles long, because that’s the approximate square mileage of the city, and everyone enjoys a casual link between measurements of distance and area.

The original 49 mile route looked like this:

It started at City Hall, but ended at Treasure Island for the Golden Gate International Exhibition. When the exhibition closed in 1940 and the navy took over Treasure Island, the drive was rerouted to end where it started. It’s been modified a few times since then.

The original signs marking the route were pretty plain. The seagull design showed up in the fifties. If you’re planning to navigate the path purely by following the signs, good luck- they get stolen a lot.

City Hall

City Hall was completed in 1899, after nearly thirty years of planning and construction. Eight years later, it was destroyed by the 1906 Earthquake. That’s not a great ratio of construction to function. They should have waited to build it until after they decided to have the quake. Poor planning, really. The current City Hall was designed and built by 1915 so it could be ready for the 1915 Pan Pacific International Exposition.

If you’d been there in January 1954, you might have seen Marilyn Monroe & Joe DiMaggio stopping by to get married.

And if you were there in fictional 1936, you might have seen Indiana Jones hanging around with Marion Ravenwood.

Forget it, Jake. This is a different Chinatown.

When Grant Avenue was still Dupont Street, it was not exactly a fun tourist location, unless you were really into opium dens, brothels, and Tong Wars. After the 1906 earthquake it was rebuilt and renamed after Ulysses S. Grant.

Chinatown is the setting of the 1986 Kurt Russell action-fantasy movie Big Trouble in Little China. The biggest fantasy of the film? Someone driving a big rig through Chinatown.

Fisherman Worf

The most important thing about Fisherman’s Wharf is that it was where James Bond met CIA agent Chuck Lee in the 1985 smash hit film A VIEW TO A KILL!

Okay, this post is getting long, and I’d like to get it posted before I die, so I’m going to stop for now. Maybe I’ll do a Part II later. Don’t bet the ranch on that.

…but if you’d like to read about how Katherine & I got back together, you can read this ancient block of stuff I wrote for a creative writing class a couple of decades ago. It’s how I remembered it then, though I remember some of it differently now. Brains are weird.

Ten days left! Go donate!

First, the failure

Every semester I tell my students the same thing: “I want you to fail.” Then I explain that I don’t mean that I want them to always fail. What I hope is that they will try things they don’t know how to do, things they might not have any idea how to accomplish. If they do that, they are pretty much guaranteed to not always succeed. But they will learn how to accept and deal with things going wrong. This is an important skill. Things always go wrong, and failure is normal. And they’ll learn some things that don’t work, so the next time they try to do a similar project they’ll already have made progress toward the solution.

Another thing: my students often get frustrated when things don’t work and abandon projects without turning in their attempts. I always tell them to turn in their challenging projects, even if they are incomplete. The failures are important. Something that a student labored over and could not get to work is much more impressive than something a student knocked out without a struggle.

Now I’m staring at a personal failure. Even worse: because the challenge goes until June 30th, t won’t officially be a failure for three weeks. I technically could still do the final 1400 or so miles, if I rode around 65 miles a day, every day until the end of the month.

That’s not going to happen.

So: failure is coming. What am I learning? What benefits were there? What skills did I get for other projects?

I learned that I can raise money for a good cause, a valuable skill. I learned that if I set a goal for a project I should build in more time to work on it than I think I’ll need to complete it. I definitely got better at riding, particularly hills. And I reconfirmed my knowledge that people are awesome. My failure is the foundation of my next success.

Man, I’m deep.

Now, the donuts…

Donut Time was the location of Tangerine, a film by Sean Baker. It was shot completely on iPhones. It received a ton of awards and nominations. I’ve never watched it, and I’m not sure why. Baker’s follow-up, The Florida Project, was probably my favorite film of 2017.

I never had a donut from Donut Time, and I’ve never had one from Magee’s. I’ve had Trejo’s, but it was near closing time when I went and the donuts weren’t fresh, so I can’t accurately judge them.

…and the ice cream

I’m not surprised that I couldn’t get ice cream at the drive through. Most places won’t serve a bike, even though they’ll serve a motorcycle. However, I was a bit surprised that I could bring my bike into the store, even though it’s no dirtier than walking. I’m guessing if it had been crowded I would have had more resistance, but there were only two other people in the giant store.

That particular store is the one closest to Baskin-Robbin’s corporate office, so it’s bigger and fancier than most shops. It also gets fun promotions. A couple of years ago, it was turned into Scoops Ahoy as a Stranger Things promotion.

Great. Now I want MORE ice cream.

Renaming Jordan Middle School was a good idea. Not only was Jordan a eugenicist, he also once helped to cover up a murder of a colleague. Yeah, he was a peach.

Dolores Huerta, on the other hand, is awesome. She turned 91 in April and she’s still at it! Here’s a link to the Dolores Huerta Foundation for Community Organizing.

I did have one tiny issue with the school being named after her. There are three middle schools in Burbank, and they we’re all originally named after naturalists; the other two are John Muir and Luther Burbank. It would have been cool if they could have found another naturalist for the new name. But as I said this is a tiny issue, roughly on the level of “you gave me this awesome mansion but this one closet still has some stuff hanging in it.”

Tomorrow: a big ride. WHEEEEE!