I'm a lasagna boy!

In which I need to get a new pair of glasses

I just stopped at the local store -- the cheese, dates, and bulk grains store -- to pick up a snack (cheese, dates, and bulk grains, in fact). I was carefully selecting dates from the two bins, medjool on the left and deglet noor on the right, when a woman came into the store, doubling the number of customers. She barrelled straight down the aisle towards me, and I reflexively moved closer to the table with the dates. She stopped, but barely, right against me. I continued with the dates, and she bellowed, "Excuse me!" I looked at her and said, "One moment, I'll be done in a moment," and she glared. I finished with one batch of dates and moved around the table so that she could pass -- and she yelled, "Can't you see I'm too fat to get past?"
I am so glad that she neither had the manners to wait, nor the brains to go around to the other aisle (the other side of the table, in fact), nor the shame to not yell about her girth. I felt stunned for a moment after she squeezed past.

Good thing I am going to get a new pair of glasses: I will be able to see the fat people coming.

UPDATE: The dates were dry and rotten. I wish I had a monkey to taste my dates.

Nam June Paik

One of the unexpected and interesting assignments I received during junior high school came as part of an art class: visit the modern art museum, and write about one of the pieces we enjoyed. I saw a breathtaking and startling three-dimensional installation by Nam June Paik. Paik died yesterday.

In which it walks like a duck

flyakite announced v3, which implements OSX in a browser. I smell lawsuit, the same open-grave odor that brought down the googleX homage to the dock.
In other OSX news: jwz is porting xscreensaver to the Mac.

Notes on interactions with the civic government

Sidewalk ownership, rights, and responsibilities
http://sfexaminer.com/articles/2006/01/25/news/20060125_ne01_sidewalk.txt

Crime maps, which require a specific computer operating system and browser, and clicking two "I agree" buttons:
http://www.sfgov.org/site/police_index.asp?id=23813

In which the hit-and-run is close to home

Anna and I were sitting in a restaurant down the block from Cafe della Stelle when a hit-and-run took out pedestrians and a goodly chunk of the Cafe building itself. Apparently, three of the hoodlums involved fled and disappeared. Upstanding men that they were, they abandonded their injured passenger, a woman.
The neighbourhood seems unperturbed when we walked past again this afternoon.

Three people were injured after a high-speed chase between two vehicles involved in an accident ended with one of the cars crashing into a Hayes Valley restaurant Friday, according to San Francisco police.

The crashed car, a white Buick, went out of control at the intersection of Hayes and Gough streets, jumped the southeast corner curb and struck two pedestrians before plowing into the Cafe delle Stelle at 395 Hayes St., Lt. Frank Lee said. Three men, including the driver, abandoned the car and fled on foot. They left behind a passenger, a woman who was also injured in the crash.

Lee said the pedestrians, both men, and the passenger were taken to San Francisco General Hospital. He said they were in stable condition.

The accident occurred about 8:30 p.m., shortly after the Buick was involved in a crash with a silver Pontiac at Oak and Webster streets. The Buick fled the scene, but it was followed by the other vehicle, whose driver called 911.

The vehicles were traveling east on Hayes Street when the Buick's driver lost control of his car after hitting a westbound black Honda, which was trying to make a left turn onto Gough Street, Lee said.

He said the men in the Buick were last seen running east on Market Street.

In which it is "outsider" art

A tree made from junk mail, by sculptor Hector Dio Mendoza. The sculptor planted the tree at the Sunset Scavenger recycling facility in San Francisco (I am still waiting for my tour -- a representative from the company, curiously named "Lolita Sweet", left a message promising to schedule a site visit and has not returned my calls since), which promotes an Artist-in-Residence scheme. Sirron Norris, whose bright, cartoony murals decorate our local cheese-steak-ery, recently participated in the program

In praise of beer

... but not of pilsener, or of lager. Give me a pint of bitters, of ale, and especially a pint from the cask.

Zeitgeist, that place that so perfectly is San Francisco, no longer carries cask ales: they did not sell. The bartendeers at the Toronado look more than usually put out when I ask for a cask ale -- "You know I have to pull that by hand, and it takes a couple minutes, right?" they always inform me. Yes. I am not in a hurry to get the beer: if I were, 40s of the Champagne of Beers are $1.99 ("Out the door!" the sticker on the bottle gleefully reminds me) at any corner shop.

Magnolia, in the otherwise-execrable Haight, produce some very tasty, and fresh beers. Hurrah for their Ruby Red!

In which we hand it over

I do not think that four-dollar tolls are too much to pay for driving over the Bay's Bridges (excepting, perhaps, the Hayward-San Mateo: you couldn't pay me enough to drive over that). I blame mis-management for the third rise in seven years (in 1998, the toll was $1): paying for ice-cream castles sure ain't cheap. The Golden Gate Bridge, which suffers under its own transit authority rather than the state's, will have the opportunity to raise its rates, currently starting at $5, separately.
The Portland TriMet may squeeze out of a $48k lawsuit, thanks to the statue of limitations. A bus and its unruly passengers whacked a cyclist on the Hawthorne Bridge.

In which we have a personal mythology

As modern-day literary liars James Frey and JT Leroy raise public awareness of truth vs. falsehood (or, as Herr Dr Strasser would put it, "Richtig oder Falsch?"), one thinks back to great literary identity crises: William Shakespeare, for example. Frey created a milquetoast personal mythology; he followed up with a weak story of redemption, one calculated to bring a tear to a certain eye. JT Leroy is a composite designed to fit the personality that would write the books published under his (her) name; the blame for this equally rests with readers and the media, who fan the fires of celebrity: who is behind the books becomes as important a question as what does this book mean? The character of an author cannot be completely divorced from the author's work: think of what the Divine Comedy would be without Dante and his Beatrice; or, for that matter, without its translators?

Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter -- the only reason to read the Chronicle! -- sheds light on the public perception of memoir embellishment.

Mac OS X Internals : A Systems Approach

Amit Singh, of kernelthread.com, has an upcoming book on Mac OSX internals. He has a nifty presentation available through his web site; the book itself will take a constructivist approach to examining the kernel, much as Kirk McCusick did with his book on the BSD kernel.

Some of the interesting bits he discusses:

kernel messages

drivers in kernel- vs. user-space, shielding programmers from "gory" details of i/o


With the advent of the new Intel core computers, the drivers need to be written in C (-based EFI) vs. the G5 Forth-based Open Firmware.

IPC vs Sockets: the former optimized for the local, rather than network, case. Copy-on-write

Why don't you tell me what really happened?

Chris Penn died. His final scene in Reservoir Dogs ranks amongst my favourite spluttering speeches of all (movie) time. The culminating "Why do'n't you tell me what really happened?" gives me chills and chuckles.

In which we see the modern Joe Henry

Colin takes on the Glasgow underground in this murky video clip. A nice wager, 'though not as daft as the challenge undertaken by the protagonist in Tunnel Vision, Keith Lowe's neatly-done book about a tube buff on his wedding eve. I still have never taken the Eurostar, which courses through the Chunnel, certainly one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the twentieth.

After reading about Colin's challenge, I thought, briefly, that something similar might be amusing to try with MUNI. But the biggest obstacle is overcoming the throngs entering and exiting each subway station; this, presumably, is why Colin chose an advanced hour for his go. But MUNI does not operate at the late hours any longer.

In which you really can say it with a card

Greeting cards, as funded by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. I fondly remember the "Syphilis 2004" campaign, complete with a cartoony penis and sores, but the web site appears to have gone away.
UPDATE: My memory is good, but my dates were bad. The cartoony penis was from the Healthy Penis 2002 campaign. An excerpt from the comic: "Syphilis sore? You told me you were a sales rep from Ohio!"

The Silmarillion

After my annual reading of J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, I found myself interested for the first time in re-reading the tales of The First Age, and of the destruction of Númenor. I found a pleasantly hefty, illustrated edition of The Silmarillion and began anew through Tolkien's cosmogony. Even as he unraveled the mysteries of his world's creation -- John Donne would have appreciated how the spheres came into being literally through song -- he established the characters and tone for the weighty conclusion of his Lord of the Rings story.

I also stumbled upon the delightful Crackpot Tolkien Theories page, which collects some of the more loony pieces from rec.arts.books.tolkien, including one that reaches the astonishing conclusion that Tom Bombadil and The Witch-King of Angmar, Chief of the Ringwraiths, are one and the same person. What did Gandalf want to talk about with Bombadil, anyway?

In which we pay the property taxes

The Lower Haight's much-beloved pile of poop, Duboce Park, will go from being like Paris to being like 1920s Shanghai. The Recreation and Park Commission will carve the park into three parts.
The article quotes a woman who does not want to scoop her dog's poop: that, she says, is what she pays property taxes for.
I do'n't care that San Francisco has more smelly dogs (120,000) than stinky kids (110,000): once a dog poops or pees on a grassy area, there is no way that I would sit down and enjoy a picnic. San Francisco's violently vocal dog owners are all too eager to ignore the perils of hygiene that dogs create, and not only in the parks. Hardly a day passes that I do'n't nearly trip over solidifed shit on the sidewalk. This is why I refuse to wear shoes inside the house.

In which the third world is just around the corner

Since cities developed in the industrial world, became the urban accumulations of filth, pestilence, and illiteracy. I know that begging, thievery, and distrust are part and parcel of a city, and yet I still shudder to see legless men frothing at the mouth, asking for something to eat or some change.
The Lower Haight has at least its fair share of begging, thievery, and distrust: a walk along Divisadero, the western boundary of the street, shows it as sordid as Laguna or the 300 block of Haight itself. Drug deals take place at mid-day, day labourers await a scrap of work, and beggars sleep in doorways covered with graffiti tags. Storefronts are perpetually shabby -- did Victorian shops really have a sheen to them? -- and the sidewalks are dirty, uninviting.

Cyril Wecht, who first came to my attention when he was sarcastically voted for City Dogcatcher in Pittsburgh Magazine, faces yet another indictment on federal fraud etc. charges. Wecht, has been part of the dog-and-pony show at several circuses, including the Kennedy assasination, JonBenet Ramsey, O J Simpson, and, of course, the Fox Alien Autopsy.

In which The Mayor explains MUNI budget shortfalls

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has found MUNI's missing millions: cable-car conductors are embezzling from tourists and homeboys alike. This is the perfect time for Nathaniel Ford, the new head honcho at MUNI, to declare that the transportation system will begin using electronic fare collection.

No, it turns out to be the perfect time to shut down the subway system early each night for the next year. At least: MUNI still has not completed the much-anticipated Third Street Light Rail project. And their intensely-convoluted web site galls me, in its inaccessibility and its backwards attempts to provide accessibility.

The Great Train Robbery

Kate sent a copy of Michael Crichton's thrilling bestseller The Great Train Robbery. Fascinating for its detailed, fictionalized account of a bank heist, the book contains a delightful amount of early Victorian slang: some rhyming slang, some Cockney, and much from the "criminal class", all artlessly lumped together. Still, the narrative rushes along with exciting twists and characters.
The story no doubt inspired pieces of movies such as The Sting, Ocean's 11, The Limey, but the tales of grift, deceit, and ruthless thievery it contains are entirely its own.

In which the lanes shift automagically

The New York Times reports on the slow plan to rebuild the Tappan Zee Bridge.

My favourite part of the Tappan Zee is the way that the rush-hour lanes shift: a truck drives the length of the bridge, moving rubberised lane dividers over fifteen feet.

Reefer Madness

Eric Schlosser has collected three powerful essays on US policy, on marijuana, migrant workers, and pornography into a collection entitled Reefer Madness". Although his bias in each essay becomes quite clear in the conclusion of each piece, he maintains an even tone while setting out the research, and he recounts the horrific information he uncovers: two-faced American enforcement, which looks the other way when faced with the humiliating treatment of Mixtec workers who cross the border to provide us with cheap fresh fruit, but work almost in a vengeful wrath trying to stem the flow of pornography.
He links three topics as components of the seamy underbelly of the American economy, but the policy aspect is what really fascinates me: steely American Justice saving us from the evils of marijuana and from porn, but nowt when the large corporations face labour problems.

In which me plait le fromage au pay's

I like French cheese's, the smellier the better.
I also like Wallace and Gromit, of w. the former and I share an appreciate for tasty English Wensleydale, available from our friends at Neal's Yard.

Sarah Tucker

Sarah Tucker was struck by a car while riding her bicycle yesterday down Polk Gulch in San Francisco. She died from the injuries. The car did not stop; police have not arrested anyone.

In which we like the coffee

I picked up a half-pound bag of Yemen Sana'ani beans from Blue Bottle Coffee, the excellent purveyors of beans and macchiato (and why yes, I did spend fifteen minutes standing in line for this cup of coffee, thankyouverymuch). With these beans, I made a presspot full of coffee this morning, and boy howdy! the most delicious, and pleasantly mild, coffee I have tasted in years. Fantastic! Delicious! Instead of placing the remaining bits of the pot into the 'fridge, I am drinking it down.

The macchiato that James makes down at the Blue Bottle push-cart at the Ferry Building make me very, very content with coffee. They also look very appetising!

Look at nice photos of espresso atEspresso Lab.

100 % Yemen Sana'ani This is an intoxicating coffee that produces a huge aroma, and, at this medium-to-dark roast level, it is one of the few single-origin coffees that makes an excellent shot of espresso. Also terrific as a filter or presspot, coffee from Yemen is still farmed much the same way as it was 1200 years ago: harvested by hand from ancient, often wild, non-hybridized cultivars, dried on local patios, and processed locally before being shipped. While not certified organic, Yemens are considered pesticide-free owing to the strong farming traditions which predate pesticide use. One more thing: you might not like it. Lovers of clean, snappy Costa Ricans, or Colombians might consider drinking a cup of Yemen uncomfortably similar to being picked up by the lapels, shaken, then tossed into a grimy Manhattan snow bank. But for some of us, this is the most complex and desirable cup in town.

In which we tell the joke slowly

This one's for Aram: the best blonde joke evar.

And this one is courtesy Aram: Three fonts walk into a bar. The bartender says "Get the Helvetica out of here!" I started off telling it as "The bartender says 'We do'n't serve your type here!'" but I think Aram scores the point. Maybe I get the assist.

The Unix-Haters Handbook

Although this classic, edited by Simson Garfinkel et al., is out of print, one of my office-mates left his copy lying about. It is also available in full online, courtesy Microsoft: http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html.

Perusing this book brings to mind the old witticism: "Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence."

In which we wish you a happy birthday

Albert Hofmann turns 100 today.
Most famous, perhaps, for the colourful bicycle ride he experienced after administering his synthesized hallucinogen to himself, he also fits in well to the words and sentiments of REM's song "Man on the Moon": "Albert Hofmann / on a bicycle ride / yeah yeah yeah yeah / Albert Hofmann is the chemist of shrooms / (etc) / now Albert did you ride along this street (etc) ..."

I have a very handsome edition of his memoir, "LSD: My Problem Child", which is readily available online.

Fear and Trembling

Today marks the Islamic holiday Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice. When God commanded (or requested) that Abraham take Isaac on a trip over to the mountain, whereupon the head of the latter would be removed by the former as a sign of devotion to God -- well, Abraham snapped his heels together and dressed his only son in his Sunday best. He told his wife Sarah that he would return post-haste, but omitted that Isaac would not require round-trip busfare.
Soren Kierkegaard examines this parable in Fear And Trembling, and asks the reader to question the nature of ethics, and of good and evil: are these intrinsic to the cosmos, or determined by the orders of God? are ethics teleological, and this subject to order?
I have the Penguin Classics edition of this short work, and -- rare amongst my books -- I marked the inside cover with my name, and with the place and date of each time I have read it: Chicago, 1991; Pittsburgh, 1995; Park City, 2002; Fès, 2002 (wow: I bet I ate some great lamb on that trip!).
A similar parable occurs in Greek legend: Euripides makes use of it in his retelling of Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, Iphigenia at Aulis; Plato examines the directives of ethics in Euthyphro, amongst other dialogues.

In which we complement the curry chips

Now when I am stumbling over to Beshoffs on O'Connell Street, I know how to plan my footsteps before and after: the Proper Pint web site shows maps of Dublin, with nifty annotations about each pub. And I suppose that if I am out late, then I can lift my feet over to the Beshoffs take-away on Westmoreland Street.

The famous Beshoffs fish and chip restaurant was founded by Ivan Iylanovich Beshoff a seaman in the navy of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II.

He fled Russia after he took part in an ill-fated mutiny on the battleship Potemkin at Odessa in 1905 and arrived in Ireland in 1912 with the intention of travelling on to Canada. He missed his boat connection and decided to stay.

Three hurrahs for curry chips! and for pints! and for cask ales!

In which we head for the end zone

The District 5 supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, hopes to re-zone parts of Haight St between Pierce and Fillmore in order to accomodate the famed San Francisco pot clubs. While his heart may be in the right place, the disproportionate amount of time and energy that his office spends on the legislation for medicinal marijuana has detracted from other, critical problems in the neighbourhood.
He has let his attention lapse from the very serious homicide issue; he has dropped the ball on community policing, which for a while in autumn looked like it might actually happen; and, more disconcertingly, has not shown a presence in addressing the problems that make community policing important. The tide of vandalism (graffiti, tagging, smash-and-grab theft) continues unabated, despite vocal community protest.

I do not agree with the priority that the pot clubs receive; and, after much observation, no longer feel that they are consistently good members of our community. Despite their pretentions to healing and medicine, they encourage more loitering and traffic, -- I'm thinking of the Vapor Room in particular, because I always have to trip across parked cars, wandering stoners, and dilettantes standing in front of their basement entrance. Why not find a way to integrate marijuana dispensaries into already-legitimate pharmacies? We have several of those, including the Davies Medical Center. I also find the overwhelming number of medicinal marijuana dispensaries problematic: in a neighbourhood without bookstores, a fresh fish market ("Lo-Cost Fish and Seafood" on Haight St. doesn't count as fresh), nor a doughnut shop, how come we have a half-dozen pot clinics? It's easier to get (semi-legally) stoned than it is to get a bunch of flowers or a copy of Moby-Dick in the Lower Haight. The zoning distinction is NC-1 vs NC-2, where NC stands for "Neighborhood Commercial District"; the -2 allows a business to remain open until 2 AM, where the NC-1 requires a specific permit for this. The proposal for this stretch of the Lower Haight also converts the existing Victorian residential (RH-2 and -3) buildings to NC-2, allowing for more basement businesses such as the once-proud Naked Eye, and for the Vapor Room to be open into the wee hours. Will this bring additional commercial traffic into the neighbourhood? Quite probably -- but, without amendments for additional transit and parking, we may see an increase in automotive traffic. Happily, NC-2 calls for street beautification such as trees.

While I am glad that District Five comprises a forward-thinking population (limp cheers from the audience), I suggest that our Supervisor make as much noise about the residential problems of crime and vandalism as he does for the commercial, hip issue of for-sale pot. And he should find some city monies for an epidemiological study of why so many goddam fixed-gear riders have glaucoma.

... or perhaps I am just cynical because I can't get any of the good stuff from the dispensaries. Hey, Ross! Where's my dope prescription?

In which the sacrificial bonfire must burn

Last night, Aram drove down in his big old ford pickup and we filled it with discarded xmas trees, proceeded to Ocean Beach, and set them all ablaze. Unsuprisingly in the town that inspired Burning Man, a whole festival devoted to incendiary pyrotechnics and bacchanalia, several other folk had the same idea, but I think that we were the only people with smores (and whiskey)! Anna and I had made a last-minute stop at the exquisitely depressing supermarket adjacent the very depressing 70s condo development that faces the beach area (and replaced Playland, the amusement park that occupied the beachfront for most of the twentieth century) and picked up skewers, marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars. The harassed cashier looked dejected in the yellow-green hues of the flourescent lamps, and the floor manager kept popping up behind her to ask: "Do we carry mops? Do we carry cleaning solution?" And, overwrought, she answered, "I do'n't know. I do'n't know." We skedaddled over to the OB, where we lit the fire, watched the needles burn and send sparks high into the still evening air, and then handed over the embers to an erstwhile arriving group who had even brought some hardwood to get a real bonfire going.

In which we stare at the tickr-tape of the unconscious

David Young released tickr, a pretty cocoa app that scrolls images from flickr. Vive le flickr!

In which I get pissed off

Artist Arrested for Vandalizing Urinal, which brings to mind headlines like "Police seize excrement catapault" and "Missing monkeys found shaved", was the lead for a news story about performance art involving modern art.

Friday, January 6, 2006

(01-06) 13:40 PST PARIS, France (AP) --

A 76-year-old performance artist was arrested after attacking Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" — a porcelain urinal — with a hammer, police said.

Duchamp's 1917 piece — an ordinary white, porcelain urinal that's been called one of the most influential works of modern art — was slightly chipped in the attack at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the museum said Thursday. It was removed from the exhibit for repair.

The suspect, a Provence resident whose identity was not released, already vandalized the work in 1993 — urinating into the piece when it was on display in Nimes, in southern France, police said.

During questioning, the man claimed his hammer attack on Wednesday was a work of performance art that might have pleased Dada artists. The early 20th-century avant-garde movement was the focus of the exhibit that ends Monday, police said

A 2004 poll of 500 arts figures ranked "Fountain" as the most influential work of modern art — ahead of Pablo Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Andy Warhol's screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and "Guernica," Picasso's depiction of war's devastation.

"Fountain" is estimated at $3.6 million.

In which the gov'mint has a long way to go

From the first paragraph of the American Forces Press Service newsletter: "President Bush today kicked off a new national program designed to increase the number of Americans fluent in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindu, Farsi, and other critical-need languages."

The first critical need is noting the distinction between Hindi, "an Indo-European language spoken mainly in North, Central India and Western India; and Hindu, an adherent of "the dominant religious, philosophical and cultural system of Bharat (India), Nepal and the island of Bali".

In which th' other shoe has yet to drop

John Cage composed a piece of music, and his successors have drawn it out to a 639-year-long piece ("What, you started with 4'39"? We can make that initial rest a year and a half!").

In which the system is down

The fileserver behind this is having some issues.
In the meantime, consider that MUNI will be shutting down the Market St Subway later this month, in order to perform some maintenance:

Metro Subway Stations from Embarcadero to Church Street
To Close at 10 pm Monday-Friday for Metro Improvement Project
On Tuesday, January 17th, 2006, the Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA) will begin Phase I of the Metro Improvement Project. The Metro subway from the Embarcadero to the Church Street stations will close at 10:00 p.m. instead of 1:00 a.m. Monday-Friday for Phase I of the project. Also, there will be no N Judah rail service after 10:00 p.m. Monday-Friday between the Caltrain depot at 4th & King Sts. and Duboce Ave. & Church St. Bus shuttles will provide substitute service for the subway trains. The Castro Street, Forest Hill, and West Portal subway stations will remain open until their usual closing time of 1 a.m. Monday-Friday during Phase I.
The Metro Improvement Project
The Metro Improvement Project will replace the overhead-wire system that provides power for the Metro cars in the subway. Phase I will take approximately one year and includes the stations from Embarcadero to Church Street. Phase II, which will start in the winter of 2007, will replace the overhead-wire system between the Castro Street and West Portal stations. Combined, the two phases will take approximately two years. The replacement project is necessary because the overhead system in the subway is over 25 years old, and maintenance costs and service problems in the subway have been increasing because of the aging system.
Metro Service After 10:00 p.m. Monday-Friday During Phase I
After 10:00 p.m. Monday-Friday, K, L, and M Metro rail lines will only operate between their outer terminals and the Castro Street Station until the start of regular Metro Owl bus service at 1:00 a.m. J and N Metro rail lines will only operate between their outer terminals and Church & Market Sts. until the start of Metro Owl bus service. Shuttle bus service will be provided between 4th & King Sts. and Castro & Market, along King St., The Embarcadero, and Market St., until the start of regular Metro Owl bus service. The buses will stop at designated stops along the route. Passengers will be able to transfer to and from the J and N Metro rail lines at Church & Market, and to and from the K, L, and M Metro rail lines at the Castro Street Station.
Saturday-Sunday Metro Service
Saturday and Sunday evening Metro rail service will not be affected, and all the stations in the subway will close at their usual time of 1:00 a.m. However, Saturday morning Metro rail service will start at 7:00 a.m. instead of 6:00 a.m. for the duration of the project, and Metro Owl bus service will be extended to 7:00 a.m. on Saturdays.
Ballpark Service
Metro rail ballpark service on the K and N lines will be provided on baseball game days. However, no rail service from the subway to the ballpark will be available after 9:30 p.m. Monday-Friday. For games that end after that time, K and N rail service from the ballpark will only be provided by the Metro cars that have been banked to the west of the Caltrain depot. After those cars have picked up passengers at the ballpark, service from the ballpark will be provided by the shuttle buses as outlined above, as well as by the regularly scheduled 15 Third Street, 30 Stockton, 45 Union-Stockton, and 47 Van Ness bus lines that serve the ballpark area.
Accessibility
Transfers between the shuttle buses and rail service will be provided for wheelchair users and others needing to use the accessible wayside platforms for the J and N Metro rail lines. The transfers will take place at the Duboce Ave. & Church St. stop for both inbound and outbound J-line service, as well as for inbound N-line service, and at the Duboce Ave. & Noe St. (Duboce Park) stop for outbound N-line service.

For more information on Muni service, please call Muni's Telephone Information Center at 415/673-MUNI (673-6864), or visit Muni's Web site at www.sfmuni.com. For information on Muni's Accessible Services Program, please call 415/923-6142 (TTY 351-3443).

In which what goes around, comes around

Mr Marion Barry, the former mayor of a city which really deserved so addle-pated a politician at its head, suffered the ultimate indignity: having his lunch money taken away during a robbery.

WASHINGTON - Former District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry was robbed at gunpoint at his apartment by some youths who had helped him carry his groceries.

Barry, who wasn't injured in the Sunday night robbery, said he gave the youths a couple of dollars for helping him with his groceries and they left. They returned, however, and pointed a gun at his head and took his wallet, which contained cash and credit cards, Barry told WRC-TV.

Barry, 69, is a member of the City Council and served four terms as mayor. In his third term, he was videotaped in 1990 in a hotel room smoking crack cocaine in an FBI sting. The following year, he served a six-month prison sentence.

He is awaiting sentencing later this month in federal court on his guilty plea to two misdemeanor counts stemming from his failure to file income tax returns in 2000.

I laughed aloud when I read about Barry's felony conviction for crack possession, and chuckled some more when I heard of his subsequent coke-and-marijuana arrest. But I laughed hardest when the citizens of DC re-elected him.