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I first saw the wolfman at Edinburgh a few nights ago. He was in some sort of photoshoot, and hamming it up REAL hard. Then last night I see him at Dominoes indulging in a greasy pizza delight. Who is he??
You know you hate me for saying it, because you know it’s true. Whenever you see one of those little motorized carts driving around, it’s almost always some insanely large pile of human driving it. In my hometown, there were actually two incredibly large piles of human that loaded themselves on to one of those to “drive” out to the local Indian casino to win whatever pair of new shoes baby may have needed that month. My childhood consisted of random flecks of color and culture in case you were wondering.
But, here in the Loin, I see a surprising number of these carts wheeling around. And unlike seeing a 400lb woman piloting her way down the supermarket aisles with her orbiting children picking out the groceries, there are indeed guys riding these around who don’t have legs or are paralyzed or are in some other way, legitimately handicapped. In this case, I’m totally pro-fatcart because they then go back to being what god intended them to be: motorized wheelchairs.
I’m just really stunned at the speeds these things will get up to. Sure, there’s the version that’s slower than trying to walk between Clay & Pacific via Stockton in the afternoon, but then there’s this version that flies by faster than I can sprint (but please don’t ask to see me sprint as I’m all limbs.) Like that one in the shot above near the Civic Center Library. That cart went blazing past a dude on a bicycle. This all makes me wonder that if they aren’t going to put limiters on these things, then can we all have one? And what would have to do to get one? Pull some mix of George Costanza stunt? And most importantly, would you be able to use the carpool lane on the Bay Bridge, not that that matters anymore…
When there was a RiteAid at the corner of Bush & Larkin, I was relatively happy. Admittedly while it was strange to be able to buy Doritos and liter of vodka where I also bought my toothbrush, I went with it. Come to think of it, this was probably convenient for those picking up penicillin and needing something to chase it down with. They stocked pretty much everything I needed. Sure, the razors were under lock and key, but that’s the case everywhere, where if not needing to be unlocked, they are behind the counter.
Of course now, RiteAid got bought out by Walgreens, our new, almighty drugstore overlords. It’s wrong to say that this store has gone to shit as it was never all that great, but it’s gone to useless whatever the case. Basically, everything I could ever possibly need is now locked up. Walgreens has converted this entire store in to a walk-in ghetto corner market.
Toothbrushes? Locked up. Deodorant? Locked up. Ironically, the razors have been freed to now be behind the register. Sure, they’ll unlock the cases, but the clerk who does it eyes you with a look that yes, you could be ready to steal at any moment and tries to actually pick out the products for you. The guy asked me which deodorant I wanted to which I replied, “I don’t know. Usually when I pick one out, I get the one on sale that smells the least ‘New Jersey sleazebag out for a night on the town’”, which is often called, “unscented” I’ve discovered. Also, I don’t have a clerk hovering over my shoulder while I make my choice. That’s creepy, like Gavin Newsom stopping by your place for a drink. Oh yeah, $30 bottles of wine? Not locked up. The logic is beyond me.
As luck would have it, after giving up on buying a toothbrush and just about everything else, it was the Assistant Manager who totaled everything up at the register. I asked him what was up with all the enforcement because in reality, the majority of their losses come from the employees, not from the customers. Here are some random stats that our data master, Google allowed me to see. As you can see, 64% of store loss comes from employee theft and incompetence (which they’ve kindly called administrative error.) About 5% is the vendors screwing the stores. And then there’s that 30% of customer theft. If memory serves, that is actually a bit high and I’ve seen it totaled that customer theft is just 5% of total loss.
I pointed this out to the manager and that it was ridiculous to treat every customer who comes in the door as a potential thief. He replied that at that store they lose about $400 a day in theft and it makes up 3% of their loss. That was screwy as it meant that they make over $13,000 a day at that store. I’m not sure if he meant to say that customer theft was 30% of their losses and it was $4,000 a day. Or, he could have just been making up things as he went since he didn’t give a damn and if I wanted deodorant, I would have to go through him to get it.
Moral of the story, don’t buy from the Bush Street Walgreens! Take your business elsewhere. Maybe to Cala or even just to some other Walgreens that doesn’t lock up everything. And a word to the thieves out there, start hitting up the Walgreens in the Financial District and SOMA since they don’t lock anything up yet. Or just keep going to the Bust Street location while the rest of us shop elsewhere so that this store just dies.
Man I love me my Indian food and that makes for heaven when living in the Loin. There are piles of it everywhere. When it comes down to taste vs. price vs. reliability, I’m always a big fan of the Naan N Curry chain. I used to work (ah the days of job…) up by Jackson and ate at the one by Chinatown constantly. I know there are haters, but they probably just need more beer, especially if eating a Vindaloo.
These days, being that I am broke and in need of an Indian fix regularly, I go to the one on O’Farrell incredibly regularly. Naturally, while shocked to see it, I’m glad to note that they’ve done a large overhaul of the place.
I always thought that this place had a “happy” and a “sad” room, meaning that one always seemed gloomier than the older. Previously, it was the right hand room that was happy and the left that was sad. With wicked Indian magic, they have somehow transformed this and now I’m solidly in to the left room. Yes, it is my happy place, especially with the buffet-that-is-overpriced-outside-of-lunch staring me in the face. And it’s nice to the see the kitchen as they had mysteriously spirited it away to some unknown land prior to this opening up.
Sure, it’s not probably the healthiest food in the world. A friend I was eating with noted that she should take home some Chicken Tikka Masala, put in the fridge, and then take it to her classroom the next day to show the students what solids and liquids were. Obviously, it’s best not to think about such things and just bathe in the curry glory while you’re there. I know I do.
Well, more the fact that I sent in an email to him about something that was pissing me off and he wrote up a bit on his Between Meals blog. You can read the entry here, but let me tell you that if you love your mobile phone, you aren’t going to like what I wrote…
There has been a bit of a to-do about the fact that the Academy of Art has done any number of illegal conversions of buildings in the city of San Francisco and not paid up on permits. You can read a bit more here as well as the fact that they’re going to be “monitored” now, more here. To all of this, I say to file it up the tag of “no-fucking-shit”. On the one hand, I’m thoroughly happy that the academy is being called out on it’s transgressions against all that is good and neighborhoodly in San Francisco. On the other hand, it pisses me off to no end that it took a massive budget crunch to get whomever needed to be pushed to actually look at what the Academy has been doing. For anyone with two eyes and the ability to walk through the Loin (specifically, the TenderNob area of it) it’s about as obvious as the fact that those hookers who work at Sutter & Larkin are most certainly not the ladies they claim to be.
Look at that map of Academy buildings. Nearly half of their buildings are in the TenderNob area and as viewed by me, the Academy of Art has single-handedly destroyed the TenderNob from growing as a neighborhood. When I moved to the area in 2003, it was great. There were small cafes opening. Trendy restaurants were poking up here and there and it all smacked of gentrification without actually being gentrification. It worked as a really great balance of being a real neighborhood that stood at the edge of posh Nob Hill and rumbling Tenderloin.
This has all since crashed and burned seven years later. The rents are extremely high, not due to yuppies and gay couples moving in the neighborhood, but because landlords see a ready and wealthy market in the parents of the arts students who feel their little special princes and princesses need to have a one bedroom apartment all to themselves at the age of 18. At 18, I was living with my parents, going to junior college, and was lucky to have that. But the issue is that these kids who move in to the area to be close to the Academy buildings, that have spread far and wide like a black and tan herpes across the city, don’t give a shit about the neighborhood they’re living in. They come for a year or two, party, trash the places they live, and then move out. The transience and disregard is wearing down the neighborhood.
Thankfully, the couple who manage my building are very on the ball. But, this means scraping off tagging and other graffiti that skater art students or their friends leave in the area. This may seem like a large jump of logic to make but a) the tagging was nowhere near as bad seven years ago and b) I chased off one little asshole tagging my building only to see him the next week coming out of a dorm down the street. Then of course there’s living next door to people who really don’t care how loud their music/parties are and start to sniffle and cry if you yell at them about it. I moved out of Berkeley because students are squalid neighbors. I just didn’t realize my new neighborhood in the city would become a student ghetto as well.
This will easily turn in to an endless rant if I keep going, but suffice to say the fix that the city is going to probably put in to place is just to fine the Academy as with each student paying $25,000 a year to attend, Elisa Stephens probably has $100 bill enemas daily with all the cash she’s swimming in. It’s a money opportunity for the city, when what should really happen is to shut down, dismantle, and sell off the Academy. It is a poor education from a school that only received accreditation five years ago. It is not a benefit to San Francisco, just a detriment with its part time residents, underpaid staff, and princess limos buses clogging the arteries of downtime, which I might add also should be investigated.
We’re using these holidays stuck with family in the middle of nowhere in Northern California to catch up on our San Francisco blog readings. And among those we found this gem by the always fabulous Tangobaby for her project I live here: SF. Her name is Dottie.
Most of the photoshoot appears to have taken place on our street, almost at the corner of our now sub-let appartment. This, of course, made us a bit soft inside. We miss our neighborhood.
Read I live here: SF’s story about Dottie here, and check out her full photoset here.
Have a tender 2010, bitches!
