Month: October 2012

Is This Your Cat? Cute Black Kitty Found on Moultrie

/ Todd_Lappin / 20 Comments


Neighbor Brian just filed a Found Feline Report with the Bernalwood Office of Animal Repatriation. He says:

This black kitty showed up in our back yard on Moultrie near Tompkins about two weeks ago, and it hasn’t left. Every day since then, the kitty has been in our yard meowing and looking for some love. He doesn’t seem to be a stray and is very affectionate, loves to be pet, and will even let you pick him up and hold him. He doesn’t have a collar, but seems to be pretty healthy. I’ve kept my eyes open around town for ‘lost cat’ signs but haven’t seen any. We’d love to reunite this pretty black kitty with its owner if possible or give him a home if we can’t find his owner. Unfortunately we’ve got a couple cats already, and can’t really take in another. Hopefully, if we can’t his owner, a fellow Bernalwoodian would want to take him in.

Bernal Resident Creates RidePal, a Private-Shuttle Alternative for Everyone Else

/ Todd_Lappin / 1 Comment

Lately we have been somewhat obsessed with the secret network of private shuttles that ferry Google, Apple, Yahoo, and eBay employees to and from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. But what if you commute down the Peninsula, but don’t work for one of those BigCos? Thanks to one of your clever Bernal neighbors, there’s a shuttle available for you too… and it even stops on Cortland.

The company is called RidePal, and it describes its service as a “Google shuttle for the rest of us.” They’ve gotten some nice write-ups in The New York Times and TechCrunch. Bernal neighbor Nathalie Criou is RidePal’s CEO, and she tells us:

We are launching a slightly modified set of routes so there will be FOUR RidePal stops that are suitable for Bernal Heights residents heading out to the Peninsula and South Bay.

Existing two stops:

  • Mission and Cortland to Downtown Mountain View and Middlefield
  • Cortland and Folsom to Downtown Mountain View and Middlefield

Two new stops:

  • Cesar Chavez and Valencia to Mountain View Shoreline and to Menlo Park
  • Cesar Chavez and Harrison to Mountain View Shoreline and to Menlo Park

Cost is basically the same as that of Caltrain and anyone can sign up on the website.

PHOTO: The RidePal shuttle on Cortland, by Nathalie Criou

Supervisor David Campos Explains His Vote to Reinstate Ross Mirkarimi as Sheriff

/ Todd_Lappin / 48 Comments

With District 9 Supervisor David Campos casting a deciding vote, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors moved to reinstate Ross Mirkarimi as Sheriff yesterday, despite Mirkarimi’s guilty plea to charges of false imprisonment, and despite the City Ethics Commission’s determination that Mirkarimi engaged in official misconduct.

The SF Chronicle reports:

Four members of the board voted against the motion to uphold the finding of the city Ethics Commission that Mirkarimi had committed official misconduct, an allegation that stemmed from a New Year’s Eve fight with his wife that resulted in him pleading guilty to misdemeanor false imprisonment. The other seven supervisors voted with the mayor.

Lee needed nine of the 11 supervisors’ votes to oust Mirkarimi. Supervisors David Campos, John Avalos, Jane Kim and – in a major blow to Lee – the mayor’s appointee, Christina Olague, voted to reinstate Mirkarimi. The four said they condemned Mirkarimi’s grabbing his wife’s arm, but that it didn’t amount to official misconduct.

“I don’t believe that we should do anything to minimize how serious this was,” Campos said. “There is simply no justification for anyone grabbing another human being’s arm and bruising that arm.

“But that egregious misconduct does not fall within the definition of official misconduct,” he continued. “We must interpret this provision narrowly or open the door, open the door wide, for potential abuse.”

Campos’s attempt to parse some sort of meaningful distinction between “egregious misconduct” and “official misconduct” seems tenuous, to say the least. Even more troubling, however, is the rather obvious fact that despite Campos’s declared intention, voting to reinstate Mirkarimi as Sheriff is precisely the kind of gesture that minimizes the seriousness of Mirkarimi’s behavior. A therapist might even call it enabling. Campos is running unopposed in next month’s District 9 election. Yet for me, his handling of this matter is disqualifying.

Agree or disagree, Bernal neighbors and District 9 constituents are invited to discuss in the comments.

PHOTO: Ross Mirkarimi (center) confers with attorneys Shepard Kopp (left) and David Waggoner during yesterday’s hearing before the Board of Supervisors. San Francisco Chronicle photo by Jason Henry.

Confirmed: A Spiritually Significant Owl Sighting on Gates Street

/ Todd_Lappin / 11 Comments

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Bernal Heights is famously fashionable and always avant garde, but there has been a sadness at our spiritual core ever since the wonderful Great Horned Owls of Bernal Hill passed away in 2007.

Now, however, we are pleased to reveal that we have owl(s) living among us once again. Neighbor Lonnie reports from Gates Street:

Sunday morning a friend stopped by to say hello and greeted us with the news that he’d just seen an owl fly out of the tree in front of the house and take up a perch beneath the hedge next door.

We quickly grabbed some binoculars and a copy of The Sibley Guide to Birds and determined it was most probably a Burrowing Owl — “Only small owl likely to be found perched in the open in daylight,” according to the guide.

At first it was too far under the hedge and in darkness for me to get a good photograph, but after a while we noticed that it had moved out to the edge of the concrete steps leading to the side yard. Except — and I can’t be sure because I’d gone inside and didn’t see it actually move out from under the hedge — the owl on the steps appeared to be considerably smaller than the one we’d been looking at earlier, which leads me to believe there may be a pair roosting nearby.

In any event, our new neighbor stood there on the step a while looking at me and my camera and at a few people passing by toward the Gates Street stairs, before it turned and swooped down the narrow space between the hedge and the house, up to the top of the fence at the back of the yard. In a moment it was gone into the taller trees.

I’ve been told The Dakota Hidatsa Indians saw the Burrowing Owl as a protective spirit for brave warriors, which I’d like to be true on all counts.

PHOTOS: Neighbor Lonnie

Fashionable Photo Shoot at the Coso Street Cable Car Stop

/ Todd_Lappin / 7 Comments

Exciting news for Bernal Heights commuters: We just got a new cable car stop on Coso!

Neighbor Becky filed this report yesterday:

Cable cars on Coso street? Imagine my surprise to see a cable car running on Coso St. this morning.  And what is this city coming to? it’s decked out in Christmas decorations but it isn’t even Halloween!

Either that, or it was a photo shoot, of course. Which would explain the photographers.

Indeed! Actually, it was a photo shoot, for a Holiday fashion catalog that our sources were not able to identify. And it was an actual, for-reals cable car — albeit a motorized cable car, which is transit geek-speak for a retired cable car mounted on an internal combusion-powered truck chassis. (This particular former cable car was converted by the late, great Arnold Gridley.)

But who cares how the thing climbs up a hill? The catalog shoot affirmed our glamour credentials, and the presence of the cable car affirmed that Bernal Heights would look rather stylish with our very own cable car line. Although, we already knew that.

PHOTOS: From top, Neighbor Becky, Mrs. @LeCornballer, and @Jobius/Joe Thomas

Stunning Tilt-Shift Video of San Francisco Includes Bernal Hill Cameo

/ Todd_Lappin / 1 Comment

I’m grateful to creator Jeremy Williams for including a brief (and foggy) Bernal Hill cameo in his amazing amazing amazing new tilt-shift video of San Francisco, because that provides the excuse I need to share the video with you here. Here’s what he did:

I captured 30,000 photos over ten months of everything I love about San Francisco. The end result required 750 hours of rendering to generate 62 tilt shift timelapse sequences.

The finished piece is very WOW. Put the headphones on, and enjoy!

Hat Tip: SFCitizen

Simple, Courteous Parking Note Discovered on West Slope

/ Bronwyn Ximm / 17 Comments

Nice parking notes: They exist!

As the parking wars rage in some parts of Bernalwood, a neighbor on Elsie Street recently expressed him/herself rather more courteously in this vehicular memorandum:

Please be [considerate] next time [of] limited parking space[s] by parking in rear closer to driveway thereby allowing more space in front of you.

Could the lack of passive-aggressiveness be due to… the lovely weather we’ve been having? The civilizing influence of the nifty new Bernal-based service CurbTxt? The effects of the pharmaceutical substance on the note’s letterhead (Fluoxetine = Prozac)?

Whatever the cause, point is: Nice parking notes are possible!

New York Times Writes About Bernal-Based “Odyssey Works” Performance Collective

/ Todd_Lappin

In case you missed it, there was a big piece in the New York Times last week about Odyssey Works, an interesting art collective co-founded by Bernal Neighbor Abe Burickson. Odyssey Works creates site-specific performance pieces for a single person — “an audience of one.” The result is an immersive experience that might be described as a cross between Bertolt Brecht and Allen Funt.

The NYT explains:

For more than a decade a loose-knit, multidisciplinary collective called Odyssey Works has been quietly inverting art’s longstanding arrangement with its audience. Rather than a single artist creating for a general population, it directs many artists at a deeply researched population of one. The intricate creations that converge in the group members’ weekend-long performances — sound installations, films, performance art and more — exist only for their chosen subject, whom they’ve come to know very well. Then it all vanishes. The idea is a beautiful inefficiency: a tiny but infinitely more affected audience.

“The goal is to find the deepest possible effect of art and the full breadth of emotional experience in the world,” said Abraham Burickson, the kindly and ruminative co-founder and director of Odyssey Works. “We get to know them so well, we don’t have to use guesswork to find how to make that happen. We’re ‘Amazon recommends,’ for art.”

The beneficiary of all this activity that weekend was Laura Espino, 26, a volunteer coordinator originally from Argentina. Having heard about the group from a friend, she’d filled out a monstrously elaborate application to be its next audience. She was chosen from roughly 100 applicants, asked to leave a certain weekend open and to do no further research. Already it had begun to research her.

PHOTO: Performance recipient Laura Espino being “abducted” by Miriam Bird Greenberg and Abraham Burickson. New York Times photo by Peter DaSilva.

They’re Baaaaack! Seasonal Arachnid Invasion Now Under Way

/ Todd_Lappin / 16 Comments

The Bernalwood Intelligence Agency noted the invasion preparations underway back in May, and just as predicted, the Arachnid Forces have now established a beachhead in Bernal Heights.

Neighbor Brent reports from the front lines on Prentiss Street, where a platoon of Cross Orbweavers has taken up positions:

I don’t know if they ever went away, but the spiders are back, and they’ve shown up in my backyard as of a couple of days ago. These two have had their webs up for over two days.  I haven’t disturbed them — let them eat all the flies they want!

PHOTOS: Neighbor Brent

It Is Gone: Old Bernal Heights Library Mural Painted Over

/ Todd_Lappin / 45 Comments



After a long and difficult community-focused mediation process, followed by additional delays triggered by opponents, the old Bernal Library mural was finally painted over today.

Next steps? Artist Ruben Rude will begin painting the Moultrie-side portion of the mural. Precita Eyes will begin the prep work on the Cortland facade, including an outline for the forthcoming tile work, so we’ll soon see the scope of the new design in actual size. (The Precita Eyes portion of the mural will be executed in hand-painted tile.) Ruben is expected complete his work this fall, but Precita Eyes will probably be hampered by winter weather, so the Cortland remuralizing may go into early next year.

Once again, this is the final design of the new murals:

PHOTOS: Repainting of the old mural this morning, by Telstar Logistics

Astronomer Explores Lunar Surface and Jupiter from Bernal Heights Observatory

/ Todd_Lappin / 3 Comments

While you were enjoying the warm weather earlier this week, your neighborhood aeronautics and space agency was hard at work exploring the solar system. Neighbor Clifton, Chief of Astronomical Research for the Bernal Aeronautics and Space Administration (BASA), files this report on his most recent observations from the Bernal Heights Observatory:

The skies above Bernal Heights are ablaze with activity this week. The current heat wave and passing of the Fall Equinox has created a double whammy of astronomical delights. The constellation Orion has reappeared in the early morning, sporting “The Great Orion Nebula” or M42. Look for M42 just under the 3 star belt of Orion, it’s the blurry patch just under the belt which can be seen by naked eye and resolved brilliantly with just about any pair of binoculars.

The Autumn sky also brings the return of the king of planets: Jupiter — which I’ve been busy attempting imaging via the webcam method. This week’s waning Gibbous Moon has been an excellent target for Jupiter practice. I did a quick survey on Monday. The sky was so clear I was able to do a close-up of the lunar surface.

I also took a crack at Jupiter, with somewhat disappointing results:

Jupiter will raise earlier as the year concludes, there will be more opportunity. Look for Jupiter, or Jove as I like to call him, about 30 degrees following the moon towards the Eastern Horizon. Jupiter raises at about 12:00 AM this week.

This is your BASA astronomer, wishing you clear skies.

PHOTOS: Clifton Reed

Bernal Biker Puts Buddhist Voodoo Hex on Motorcycle Vandal

/ Todd_Lappin / 13 Comments

The awesome note shown here was spotted this morning in Bernal, near Coleridge and Virginia.

It seems that one of our neighborhood motorcycle owners had a spark plug stolen yesterday, and in response, said motorcycle owner placed a diabolical hex upon the thief. Which, in fairness, is probably deserved, because, really … stealing a three dollar spark plug is extremely lame.

PHOTO: Thank you, Neighbor Jonathan