On the last Friday evening of the month, anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand bicyclists congregate at the Embarcadero at rush hour, and then embark on a non-mapped route through San Francisco for the next couple of hours, blocking traffic and annoying motorists.
Sometimes the motorists get quite testy and try to drive through the bicycling mass, like the motorcyclist above at Franklin and McAllister, but the group has "blockers" to keep them from doing so.
On account of a few wildly publicized altercations recently between the mass of bicyclists and a suburban SUV-driving mom, a limo-driving "host" to a few working girls, and various middle-aged men in their convertibles wanting Their Right of Way Now, the police presence has been heightened and there was even a motorcycle cop riding in the middle of the bicyclists last Friday evening.
Woe to the car driver who decides they want to drive through them, as you can see above. You'll be stuck idling from two to ten minutes getting attitude from the bicyclists streaming by.
Most of the bike people seem to be not only mellow but enjoying themselves immensely, which makes for a pleasant time as a spectator. Still, as a pedestrian who neither bikes nor drives, I long for streets and walkways that belong to the ambulatory alone without people whizzing by sitting on top, or cocooned within, their hunks of metal.
In a beat-up old building on Natoma Street, behind the San Francisco Chronicle Building at 5th and Mission...
...there is a great dive bar I'd never encountered before called The Tempest with cheap drinks and a wonderful bartendress.
The occasion was an impromptu birthday party for Eve Batey (above on the left), who used to edit the SFist blogging site (click here) before she was offered actual money about six months ago to work for the Chronicle's SFGate site (click here), one of her jobs being to show them how this newfangled reader interaction thing actually works.
She's arrived at an interesting moment in the financially struggling newspaper's history, when management has just announced they will be cutting a quarter of the staff this summer. When I asked a "Chronicle" writer at the bar about the signage outside, she was withering. "The union cut its own throat during its settlement two years ago when the older, established players allowed the low-paid support staff to have their salaries cut even further, from $40,000 to $32,000 while the old players continued to make enough to pay their expensive mortgages."
Most of the guests at the party were from SFist, such as Rita Hao (above), who was the object of mayoral aide Peter Ragone's taunting before his downfall...
...along with Matt Baume (on the left), the new co-editor of SFist, who was attending with an SFWeekly dude, Brock Keeling.
Jackson West (on the right above) was SFist's first editor where he was a genius at compiling interesting posts from around San Francisco about everything under the sun. Last week, Eve hired him to do the same thing over at the "Culture Blog" at SFGate (click here), which is good news for everyone.
He not only gave "Civic Center" its first shout-out in a public forum, but he did the same for Beth Spotswood and many others.
We stumbled out of the party way later than intended, partly because the drinks were so cheap and partly because the company was so amusing, especially the Molly Ivins lookalike Gwen Knapp (above left, click here for her columns) who writes for the Sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle. Thanks for the Stella, Gwen, and check out Sharp Park in Pacifica.
In San Francisco's ornate City Hall...
...on the balcony in front of the Mayor's Office...
...there was an investiture ceremony for a dozen new and returning commissioners from various city commissions.
Possibly because a few of the commissioners involved were being named to the War Memorial Trustees Board, which is of some concern to the rich of San Francisco, the city's Chief of Protocol, Charlotte Mailliard Schultz was making sure the event went smoothly which isn't something I've seen her do before at these ritualistic affairs.
If one were to name the Most Powerful Evil Queen of San Francisco, the competition between socialite Dede Wilsey and Ms. Schultz would certainly be fierce, but I'd be inclined to give Charlotte the crown, if only because she's married to the octagenarian George Schultz. Reagan's former Secretary of State was one of the major architects in putting together the current Bush administration, which automatically vaults him into Most Evil Person on Earth contention.
As is traditional at these occasions, Mayor Gavin Newsom showed up fifteen minutes past the scheduled time of the ceremony and as is usual he only seemed to know who about half the commissioners actually were.
He gave a rambling, strange speech that included a "we probably shouldn't be talking about money in City Hall" crack making fun of Supervisor Ed Jew's problems and he also urged the commissioners to take their jobs seriously, not to use their positions merely to "consolidate power bases," and to "show dignity in their dealings with the public and their colleagues."
Gavin's lecturing others about "behaving with dignity in office" after spending most of his first term in office drunk, possibly stoned, and carrying on at least one adulterous affair...
...was amusingly hypocritical but nobody seemed to care.
They just wanted to get their picture taken with the photogenic mayor...
...and one woman even threw her baby into his arms which didn't seem to make our mayor very comfortable.
