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Money doesn't grow on trees, but that doesn't stop a group of renegade agriculturists from turning public trees into a provider for bountiful harvest by grafting fruit-bearing branches.
Meet the Guerilla Grafters:
What makes them guerrillas is the fact that this grafting is illegal. As the group’s Tara Hui explains, “people think of fruit trees as kind of a nuisance.” That’s both because of the mess they might create in the form of rotten fruit and the vermin they might attract in the form of rats. Depending on the species you’re using, grafting might also run afoul of patent law. The Guerrilla Grafters address the first two problems by making sure each grafted tree has a “steward” who can monitor and take care of it.
Andrew Price wrote the article on Fast Company: Link
David Johnson is a highly successful street performer ($60K per year) who hides behind a bush on busy sidewalks in San Francisco. When people walk by, he jumps out and surprises them. It works because they never suspect that a man is hiding behind that bush on the sidewalk.
The Unseen Sea is a lovely time-lapse video of the (foggy) skies over the San Francisco Bay Area, shot over one year by Simon Christen.
Simply marvelous! Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] – via bb-blog
Photo: Mark Boster/LA Times
Drivers looking for parking space are going to be dismayed, but the many San Francisco residents are enjoying this clever idea, a tiny "parkmobile" made from modified dumpsters:
The two bright-red dumpsters, 16 feet long by nearly 6 feet wide and filled with greenery, have been placed in a busy downtown neighborhood where they throw a little shade, elicit regular double-takes and fill curbside spots that otherwise would go to cars.
The grandly named "parkmobiles" were rolled out earlier this summer, the first in a fleet of itinerant oases in one of America's densest cities.
"The more crowded a city is, the more new ideas come squeezing out of the ferment in a combination of need and opportunity," said Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land. "New York and San Francisco are two of the most innovative places."
Not everyone's into the it, though:
When parking spots began turning into parkland, retailers and drivers groused: "So where do we put the cars?" Those who advocate for more green space in the city worried that the miniatures would replace traditional parks. Even former Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. got into the fray, deriding in a recent newspaper column the "overgrown flower boxes" that he said were a magnet for the homeless.
"The first one I came across had obviously been used as a bathroom," Hizzoner carped. "The second one I visited, a guy and gal were 'socializing' in the bushes."
We’ve all heard of all-you-can-eat, but all-you-can-watch is a whole new concept. A new company is going to let people watch all the movies they can stand for only $50 a month. They’re starting out in San Francisco, but if things work out well, they’re hoping to expand nationally. What do you guys think, would you buy the pass?
This model of San Francisco was built using nothing more than toothpicks and Elmer’s glue. Scott Weaver used over 100,000 toothpicks and spent around 3000 hours over 34 years building the piece, which includes lots of famous landmarks and a few surprises. For a video and more details, read more at Geeks Are Sexy. Link
Photo: Telstar Logistics
Here’s something I didn’t know about San Francisco: underneath the Doyle Street ramp to the Golden Gate bridge is a pet cemetery from the former Presidio Army Base:
Built in the 1930s, at the same time as the Golden Gate Bridge, Doyle Drive is now a seismic hazard, so it is being completely rebuilt. But the new construction intersects with the pet cemetery used by U.S. personnel in the days when the Presidio was still a functioning military installation. To preserve the site, the cemetery has been fenced off and left scrupulously undisturbed while a whole world of construction chaos takes place all around it. Quite a spectacle.
Photo: agirlnamedtor [Flickr]
Flickr user Tor Weeks created this clever poster illustrating the various types of bicycles you’d find in San Francisco. The Tenderloin (a sketchy part of the city, for those of you who don’t know) version is quite appropriate!
See the larger version: Link – via Laughing Squid
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This is pretty nifty: Axis Maps produces street maps of San Francisco, Downtown Chicago and Boston (New York is next) that accurately depict streets and highways, as well as parks and neighborhoods using only typography. Take a look: Link – via Holy Kaw
Are you getting bored waiting for the bus? If you live in San Francisco, you may get to play video games while you wait. Yahoo! has installed large touch screens in twenty bus shelters in that city:
As part of the promotion, transit passengers from 20 specified neighborhoods will get the chance to compete against each other in different video games — and the community that wins the two-month contest will host a block party featuring the rock band OK Go.
To compete, passengers need only to tap the screen and choose one of four games, which range from visual puzzles to sports trivia competitions. Once a rider has selected which neighborhood they want to represent, they can challenge any other waiting passenger to a live competition. Also, for anyone curious about duping the system, Yahoo has set up barriers to prevent any sort of automated competition.
Link via OhGizmo! | Photo: PSFK
Photographer Håkan Dahlström snapped this picture in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. He tilted his camera so that the building would be appear to be tipping over instead of lying on a steep incline.
Link via Boing Boing | Photographer’s Website
There’s something that the San Francisco Fire Department has that no other fire departments in the United States has: wooden ladders. Why use wood? Well, San Francisco has a lot of overhead powerlines, and wood doesn’t conduct electricity.
In this Vimeo clip, Adam Kaplan of ASK Media Productions tours the SFFD Wood Shop and reveals nifty nuggets of information, like how the first ladder built for the fire department was made in 1918 (still in use today) and that the Douglas Fir used has to be "aged" for 15 years in the shop.
Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] – Thanks Marilyn!
Jeff of Coolorama went to San Francisco and stumbled upon this beauty: The Raygun Gothic Rocketship, a sculpture by Sean Orlando, Nathaniel Taylor, and David Shulman of Black Rock Arts Foundation.
The 40-foot-tall artwork offers a retro-futuristic, highly-stylized vision of space travel circa 1930’s-1940’s science fiction and is the latest in a series of temporary public art exhibitions sponsored by BRAF to enliven and activate public spaces. The sculpture will be accompanied by a companion piece, the Rocket Stop designed by Alan Rorie, which tells the story of the Rocketship’s exploits, providing route, schedule and other information. The installation will be illuminated for nighttime viewing. (Source)
Links: More pics at Coolorama | Official website of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship [warning: ticking sound]
Instead of asking "how much is that doggy in the window," you should be asking "how many years in jail?" if you live in San Francisco. See, the Bay Area city is weighing a ban on all pet sales, with exception of fish:
Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.
That’s the law under consideration by San Francisco’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.
That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.
"People buy small animals all the time as an impulse buy, don’t know what they’re getting into, and the animals end up at the shelter and often are euthanized," said commission Chairwoman Sally Stephens. "That’s what we’d like to stop."
What do you think? Is it a good idea to ban pet sales?
“In 1905, an unknown cameraman filmed a streetcar trip along San Francisco’s Market Street. The following year, the Great Earthquake struck, and he filmed the trip again. This is a five-minute silent film that edits together excerpts of his two films. Footage from the Prelinger Archives, edited by Matt Lake.”
Perhaps the more startling aspect of the video to a modern viewer is the realization that a century ago people walked, ran, drove, rode bicycles and horses wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted in the streets. The first electric traffic lights weren’t invented until a decade after these segments were filmed.
Via ArchaeoBlog.
The next time you eat in a restaurant in San Francisco, take a closer look at the bill. You may see a new line item there, a "health" fee to cover employees’ healthcare.
Travel writer Ed Perkins of Chicago Tribune wasn’t amused:
The rationale for this one is to cover the employers’ mandatory contribution to the City’s "Healthy San Francisco" health-coverage system. The charge actually is levied on employers, but at least some restaurants are adding a few dollars or percentage points to each customer’s bill to cover this charge.
The restaurants’ excuse for assessing this charge separately is to let customers know how much they’re paying for employees’ health coverage. That’s the same excuse hotels use when they add "resort" or "housekeeping" fees to unsuspecting guests’ room bills. It’s the same excuse airlines would use to exclude fuel surcharges from their advertised fares if the Department of Transportation would allow them. And it’s sheer nonsense. Employees’ health insurance is no less of a cost of doing business than rent, property taxes, food costs, security services and all the other inputs businesses require to operate. To single out health care for a separate surcharge is unwarranted.
San Francisco is a city that has hosted and inspired many great writers. So artist Ian Huebert created an enormous map of that city filled with the words of novelists and poets who either wrote their works in those locations, or located their stories there. In the links, you’ll find a larger image. And at Strange Maps, you’ll find a list of every author and work mentioned.
Larger Image | News Story via Strange Maps | Artist’s Website | Image: San Francisco Gate
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The 2nd Annual Golden Gate Express Garden Railway is open at San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers. The garden features miniature versions of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, buildings, and of course, a train! Plus, they are all made of recycled materials. The exhibition is open until April 18th, but if you can’t go, you can see more pictures at Laughing Squid. Link
(image credit: Todd Lappin)
Remember the case of the "missing" sea lions of San Francisco’s Pier 39? Well, they have been "found":
Marine experts now believe that the Pier 39 sea lions have gone to Oregon. A couple thousand California sea lions showed up off the coast of Oregon with their typical bark that separates them from the growling Stellar sea lions that usually live in Oregon.
Dan Harkins is the Sea Lion Caves general manager. He says: "We’re seeing the sea lions coming up this way from California because of the feeding. If the cold water fish move north to find colder waters, the sea lions have to eat and they follow the fish wherever they go.”
Link (Photo: Swift Benjamin [Flickr])
Image Composite: Left: flickr/wallyg. Right: Twitter/@GarySoup
If you’ve been to the Fisherman’s Wharf part of San Francisco in the past twenty years, chances are you’ve seen (and heard) the resident sea lions that call Pier 39 home. I’d spend long stretches of time just observing them and their behavior patterns, and always found them neat.
Since about a month ago, when they collectively slipped into the bay and disappeared, the pier has been quiet and barren.
The sea lions’ disappearance is as strange as their initial colonization of the pier about 20 years ago, in late 1989. They just started showing up one day and as their numbers increased, their traditional hang out, Seal Rocks, became less populated. There are all sorts of theories about why the pier became a favorite haul-out spot for the sea lions, but no one knows for sure why the animals’ behavior changed.
It doesn’t appear that local weather conditions could have influenced the animals. The weather in San Francisco has been normal, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Rick Canaepa. “It’s pretty typical winter conditions,” Canaepa said.
There is also no apparent population increase on Seal Rock; apparently hundreds of them just decided to move on.
More than three decades ago, Scott Weaver began building a model of San Francisco out of 100,000 toothpicks. He began the fragile project at the age of fifteen, which has survived four homes, an earthquake, and a destructive dog. In The San Francisco Gate, Janny Hu writes:
“Rolling Through the Bay” is 9 feet tall, 7 feet wide and 2 feet deep. It sports four pingpong ball tracks with more than a dozen entry points.
There’s the Golden Gate tour, which snakes through Chinatown and Aquatic Park and ends at the old Fleishhacker Pool. There’s the Cable Car tour, which travels past the painted ladies of Alamo Square into Golden Gate Park and onto the old Ferris wheel at Ocean Beach. There’s even a nod to the East Bay that features a BART train and the Bay Bridge.
Look closely, though, and an even more detailed world appears. Surfers give the peace sign as they ride the waves near Ocean Beach. Two crabs are escaping from Fisherman’s Wharf. The tail of Humphrey the humpback whale splashes by the bay.
Link via DudeCraft | Image: Dornob
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Los Angeles Times’ Your Scene gallery user pablo uploaded this photo of a "lost in translation" sign (yes, made popular by Engrish.com) warning us that playing and jumping are dangerous. A quick Googlin’ pinpoints the sign near Powell St. and Sacramento St. in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Whoever those two people are, they look like they had fun playing and jumping around before taking the photo. Check out more user-submitted Weird Warnings gallery over at the LA Times: Link
(image credit: Flickr user calmenda, who has more pictures)
Our pal AskMen has a neat (and somewhat controversial) list of the 29 Best Cities to Live In (if you’re a guy), based on various criteria such as sports & entertainment, power & money, dating & sex, fashion and so forth (all things important to guys, I suppose).
Sitting at no. 3 is the place I used to live nearby, San Francisco:
Why You Should Live in San Francisco
San Francisco is a cityscape of irresistible drama. Steep hills and skyscrapers overlook a gorgeous bay that changes color with the sky. That drama filters into every aspect of the city’s life, from its topsy-turvy power politics to its go-hard recreation (3,480 acres of parks including three golf courses) and go-harder nightlife (including 2,870 bars). Since the days of the Barbary Coast, San Francisco has boasted one of the great bar and dining cultures, and is home to some of the best restaurants in North America, claiming one restaurant for every 279 people.
The louche life notwithstanding, San Francisco was the healthiest city in the U.S. in 2008, at least according to USA Today. Just outside the city lay miles of vineyards producing some of the world’s great wines. The city abounds with classic men’s stores including local favorites Cable Car Clothiers and The Hound. San Francisco is a creative sector powerhouse, with LucasArts located right in the city’s famed Presidio. The city’s boy-to-girl ratio (male: 51%; female: 49%) doesn’t seem promising at first, but remember this is San Francisco, so you can shave a good 8% to 10% off the competition right there. Be advised that women here are the cream of the brain trust — San Francisco was named one of the top 10 smartest cities by Forbes last year — so the kind of “hey baby” come-on that works in L.A. or Miami Beach ain’t gonna work here.
Link to the entire list (See if you agree with their no. 1 pick) – Thanks Daniel!
In 2007, artists Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings asked architects, city planners, and transportation engineers: "What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureacracy, politics, or physics?"
Mulling over these conversations, Lambert and Jennings reimagined San Francisco as a city of roller coasters, wildlife preserves, underground libraries, health clubs installed inside BART cars, and commuter zip lines across San Francisco Bay.
The artists created a series of six giant posters (6 ft. by 4 ft.) for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street Program. They called the series "Wish You Were Here! Postcards From Our Awesome Future." Small prints from the series are available; for ordering info, sign up on Lambert’s mailing list.
Image: Riding zip lines to Oakland; by Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
