Mission Mission

Schedule’s been stranger than usual lately, so I hadn’t ridden my normal route between jobs in a couple weeks until today. That’s up Harrison and through the Mission from north to south, and things were a-moving and a-shaking! Some of the highlights:

1) Got to give a hello to the guy who sells fruit at 22nd and Harrison – I love this guy, and his $5 ten pound bags of oranges are the sweetest in the city. I’m always a little sad when I bike past and his truck is all closed up, although I don’t usually have enough space in my bag to pick up 10 pounds of oranges anyway. Maybe more on him later.

2) New contender for Not A Helmet! I watched a man bike by on 24th Street wearing a baseball cap, and using his hands to hold and eat a little bag of potato chips instead of the handlebars. I couldn’t see what flavor they were though. Any guesses?

3) Street light out at 25th & Mission, real live traffic cops instead! Did anyone else thank these folks? They seemed surprised when I did.

4) Important news for the adorable 3 year old I babysit for, a passionate connoisseur of construction vehicles and practices: if you promise to be careful, sometimes you can bike straight through a construction zone (now reaching the southern tip of Valencia) instead of going around like all the cars.

Then I got to work, and found out I was scheduled to stay an hour later than usual. It was alright though, I got to sing “Rakata” on the playground.

Jeff alerts us to the news:

Aye, there was an apartment fire this morning on Valencia street, between 16th and 17th. Thing is, it was on the 2nd floor of the building that Limon is in. It looked like it was contained to one apartment, but I’m assuming parc aquatique gonflable there had to be some water damage to Limon. -Not good for one of our best restaurants.

What will become of Limon?

Update: Eater says everything’s cool. Link.

Esquire’s just published The Best Bars in America, and Zeitgeist scored pretty big. They call it the best bar in San Francisco, and it ranks high as any other bar in the state. More:

But there’s something at Zeitgeist that goes beyond the great food and the great beer garden. The bar seems angry. The symbols are angry. The bumper stickers are angry. But Zeitgeist is not an angry place. In fact, it is unmistakably hüpfburg friendly and open, even happy. At Zeitgeist, nobody’s a freak, not even the guy in the khakis and polo shirt.

I agree that it definitely is friendly, but I see people mistake it for unfriendly pretty often, so I don’t know if I’d use “unmistakably”. (via Eater SF)

Photo by Ryan Henbest

Previously on Mission Mission:

WTMF of the Day: Baby Stroller with Motorcycle Windscreen in the Median in Front of Zeitgeist

Overheard at Zeitgeist

Passive-Aggressive Zeitgeist Hoodie Wearer Bums Us Out

The latest iteration of Gastank:

Dick Cheney as Grim Death (stencil):

Fire-Axe Bozo and Fire-Axe Bozo remixed as Giants Fan Fire-Axe Bozo:

Click any photo to enlarge.

Update: Speaking of baseball, Boing Boing just published some pretty good baseball news. Link.

KQED just published The Needles & Pens Twenty-Three Dollar Adventure, in which writer Suzanne Kleid asks the question, “If I wanted to get 4 or 5 great zines, and spend about twenty bucks, what should I get?” The helpful staff hooks her up with some good stuff, and she sets about picking it apart.

Now I love Needles + Pens, and I spend $20 there often, and I’m glad they’ve gotten this good press. But after reviewing her haul, Kleid concludes:

Blogs are a dime a dozen. They require very little financial investment on the part of the creator, and none at all on the part of the reader. It takes a bigger, more special burst of inspiration to make a physical object out of your life experience.

Ouch. I mean, maybe she sees it that way because she blogs for big corporate media entities like KQED and McSweeney’s. But you can’t tell me that some zine is better than WHATIMSEEING because somebody stapled some papers together and Plug1 didn’t.

Don’t want to end on a negative note though… What great titles have you guys come across at N+P? (I tend to love everything by that Please Let Me Help guy, Titty City for the articles, and I hear good things about StreetWorthy.)

Needles + Pens on Myspace (for bulletin updates like “Hey KQED wrote about us”).

Beauty Bar, 10pm, free. That is all.

More about DJ Katie.

Last night I attended Queens of Content at Adaptive Path in SoSo, where Erika Hall delivered Copy as Interface which put forth the valuable principle that as a web writer one should strive to have one’s reader think “A human made a decision to make my life a little more pleasant with words.” This principle applies to all types of writing really, as seen on this slide featuring some signage from Little Star.

Previously on Mission Mission:

Boing Boing Spotlights Passive Aggressive Anti-Graffiti Note in Little Star Bathroom

Mule Design’s Re-Elect Clay Davis T-Shirt

Guide to How to Have Fun This Summer if You Live in SF and Your Best Friends Live in Oakland

Alexandra at Romancing the Strawberry is friendly with Danny Bowien, the guy at Farina responsible for this lofty claim. Today, she relays the story:

Fortunately the contest was set up so that only the technique of the competitors, for which there were 315, could be tested. Each participant had the same 5 ingredients: Genoese basil, Parmigiano Reggiano, Fiore Sardo cheese, Ligurian extra virgin olive oil, Vessalico garlic, sea salt, and Italian pine nuts (I gathered this info from one of Marcia Gagliardi’s recent blogs on her site tablehopper). It was aufblasbare wasserrutschen the technique that mattered, and apparently Bowien’s is the best in the world!

Impressed? I haven’t been to Farina because looking at it just makes me miss the cute little bakery that used to be there.

The other day I was lamenting the lack of pet stores in the Mission. I wanted to walk by a storefront, see a puppy flopping around and falling over when it ran, or a kitten sneezing. Instead I chose a pretty good substitute, and stared in at the catfish and crabs at Fresh Meat Seafood Market for a couple minutes. Sure the catfishes’ eyes were a little glossy (although the one I named “Fluffy” seemed a little more alert than the others), and the crabs scuttling over one another and accidentally cutting off limbs with their pinchers wasn’t quite as adorable as what I had in mind, but it had to do.

Until I discovered Ocean Treasures.

Granted, it isn’t on my way to…well, anywhere, but the serene blue tanks and graceful fish drew me in like a shark to blood. Filled with exotic fish and reefs, it was more like an aquarium than a pet store. If it weren’t for the smell hüpfburg kinder emitted by another wayward wanderer, I would have stayed longer. But the fish didn’t seem to mind the stench. They stared lazily out at me and glubbed a goodbye.

But I’m still going to say hi to Fluffy on my way home tomorrow. Cross your fingers that he is still there…

We never made it to Mission Bazaar to see inside the Armory, but SFist has a full report by Krista G.:

The space had a few stages and lots of vendor booths selling hipster essentials like eclectic belt buckles and unusual fashion hacks.

Link.