Hastily produced, hand-scrawled signs in six languages, including a bizarre icon, were posted along the piers of San Francisco advising people not to fish on Thursday.
This was in response to an empty container ship ramming into a stanchion around the bridge tower on Wednesday morning, which ripped a gash in its hull and caused an oil spill into the bay.
The ship, "Cosco Busan" could be seen parked in the bay on Thursday afternoon (in the photos above), like a naughty child who's been made to stand in the playground by himself after bad behavior.
Fingers are being pointed wildly by various politicians and citizens because the initial information being disseminated all day Wednesday by the ship's crew and the Coast Guard was that the spill was tiny, a mere 140 gallons, when in fact the amount was closer to 58,000 gallons. If that information had been known, efforts to block the oil slick from sweeping under piers and onto shore could have been made.
The spill produced a huge oil slick that sent noxious fumes throughout San Francisco's Financial District on Wednesday morning from about 11AM to 2PM, and caused the evacuation of the Port Commission's Pier One offices next to the Ferry Building. By the time the local news outlets finally put out the word that this was a serious disaster rather than a minor blip, the worst of it for people was over.
The response by oil spill recovery crews was quick, but not enough. They were only able to recover about 8,000 gallons of the oil laying on the water before the other 50,000 gallons sunk beneath the surface and started migrating throughout the bay, where it has been appearing in the Marin headlands, San Pablo Bay, Albany and Angel Island.
The malefactor in all this was not, as many initially surmised in internet commentary, those dirty Asian foreigners polluting our pristine Bay environment with their lax regulations, but instead a local Bay Pilot, Captain John Cota, who has a history of sloppiness that finally caught up with him when he hit the tower above on the right.
The real victims are going to be the wildlife who have somehow managed to survive within San Francisco Bay's already polluted ecology, and animal lovers throughout the area have been getting hysterical.
It's way past time to figure out a way to fuel our world without burning carbon-based molecules.
The recently produced Korean horror movie, "The Host," is set on the Han river that runs through the middle of Seoul, South Korea. After an American military man at the beginning of the film requires his Korean lab assistant to pour vats of toxic chemicals down a drain which empties into the river, a tadpole then mutates into a cross between Alien and Godzilla and mayhem ensues.
In a bizarrely appropriate bit of timing, the San Francisco Art Commission on Thursday was installing a metal sculpture by the legendary 95-year-old artist, Louise Bourgeois, of a huge spider, which looks like it just crawled out of the murky, polluted bay.
The sculpture is one of a series that Ms. Bourgeois has been creating over the last fifteen years, most of which are entitled "Maman," or "Mother," in honor of her own scheming, tapestry-weaving mother (shades of "Alien" arise once again).
The sculpture is being loaned free to the City of San Francisco for a temporary stay in the hope that a citizen with deep pockets will buy and keep it here, for the not insignificant sum of $6 million.
For an index and photos of more of Louise Bourgeois' work, which I find alternately fascinating and frightening, click here, and be sure to check out the sculpture in person. It's a wonderfully poisonous antidote to Don Fisher's clunky Oldenberg monstrosity, Cupid's Bow, further down the waterfront.
The rehabilitated, retrofitted Ferry Building reopened in 2002 just as the San Francisco economy was tanking, and its upscale, gourmet-priced food emphasis struck me as poorly timed and planned, rather like the unnecessary new International Terminal at San Francisco's airport, which opened around the same time.
In five years, though, the building has come into its own, and the area has a liveliness and energy that are real.
If only the Willie Brown Jr. administration and his short-sighted cronies had managed to put the roadway in front of the Ferry Building underground when they had a chance, the area could be even more pedestrian-friendly and the plaza thronged with old streetcars would be truly extraordinary.
Still, the pickup truck parked in front of the Ferry Building on Thursday afternoon was hosting a band playing Beatles covers, in a performance that looked unofficial and delightful.
Across the street, at Justin Herman Plaza in the Embarcadero Center, the Holiday Ice Rink opened on Wednesday.
The ice skating rink is pretty good deal, with 90-minute skating sessions costing $8 for adults and $4.50 for kids, and skate rentals are only $3.50.
On Thursday afternoon, there were only two people on the entire huge rink and they looked like they were having a blast.
To get a schedule of the 90-minute sessions and make reservations, call (415) 837-1931. Though I don't have the balance or the ankles to enjoy myself in this sport, it looks like fun, and the music blaring out of loudspeakers leans more towards roller disco than Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet."
What if they held an election, and nobody came? That's what it felt like in San Francisco on Tuesday, as a quintet of citizens including yours truly, staffed an election precinct in a fire station in the Civic Center neighborhood.
We arrived at 6AM after a short, fitful night of sleep, and set up the polling station in a freezing cold garage that only had enough light on those occasions when the fire trucks were out attending to an emergency. When they returned to the station, for some reason, half of the lights would soon be extinguished, leaving everyone to go blind while trying to find a name and address in the "Street Index."
A major part of the setup is putting up a bewildering array of signage involving voting rights and disability access in multiple languages. Though mandated by law and costing a small fortune, I never saw a single voter stop and read a single bit of it. Let's not even go into the federally mandated "Automark Voting Machine" for disabled people, which has to be the worst-designed new piece of hardware and software in American public life.
Not only is it a ridiculously complex piece of crap that is virtually useless, but the Nebraska vendor ES&S did a last-minute switch and delivered a "new" version of the voting machines which California Secretary of State Debra Bowen disallowed. John Arntz (above), head of the Department of Elections, is now charged with putting all the ballots which went through the regular "Eagle" counting machines at the polling places into the more sensitive absentee ballot counting machine at City Hall, which makes something of a mockery of the entire day's voting rituals.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera is now threatening to sue the company (click here for an article at SFGate) and is acting outraged, which seems a bit ingenuous since this situation is not exactly news. It was reported on the indespensable "Brad Blog" (click here) months ago, though I never saw the local newspapers covering it except in the most cursory way.
Still, there were a few compensations besides $165 for attending a class, presumably memorizing the training manual in all its byzantine complexity, and running a polling place for 16 straight hours. The real charm was meeting strangers such as the gentle soul Rey (above) and connecting up with the neighborhood in a different way. Plus, I had the good fortune to be with a lovely working group that didn't include a single schizophrenic, drunk, curmudgeon or outright lunatic, which I believe is a first in the half-dozen times I've worked this gig.
Jan Adams has a clear-eyed essay on the "magical thinking" involved in "Ranked Choice Voting" (click here), and it corresponds with what I observed at the polling place. At least half the voters didn't have a clue how the system worked. And for a wiseass look at the San Francisco Voter Information Pamphlet, check out Sid Chen's artful anthology of absurdities (click here).
