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In case you missed it, a good number of people filled the UN/Civic Center plaza and watched it live on a giant screen.

The crowd positively screamed when Obama said "non believers" in his speech. Walking back toward MUNI, there was a special carnival game in progress, and people could not get enough of it.

According to this article in 10 Zen Monkeys, the Bush girls wrote Obama's daughters a "welcoming" note. After eight long years of the Bush girls huffing rails off the Lincoln china and barfing up Smirnoff Ice in the Chelsea Clinton Bathroom Suite -- they told the daughters of Barack Obama, "Four years goes by so fast."

Bitches.

The night before the inauguration, every single sign on Bush Street was changed to Obama Street. Not a single sign was missed. This runs contrary to what every mainstream media news outlet is saying (claiming that one or a only few signs were improved), and they are also claiming that the swift, efficient work was done by "a vandal." It takes an idiot to only look at the surface and report it as a fact -- one search on Flickr before dawn would have provided the actual story. Or, what bits of truth were out there to be found. Even bloggers had picked up better facts by morning -- see, like this 4am post by A CA Independent's Political & Cultural Musings. The Examiner rushed this embarrassing piece out in print the *next day*, wednesday:

I think they meant to say it was done by "a VOTER." But you don't have to have been there to plainly see that this was not a single act of "vandalism" but an act of joviality. Just look at what happened when one team was apprehended by the SFPD:

It's been lightly, badly covered from NBC to even the local blogs; rather than point you to a single tag on Flickr like everyone else who rushed out a byline, look at the Obama Street photo pool, open to anyone, where the number of images is over 100. And when you consider that the sign alterations (respectfully made to be easily removed) didn't last for 12 hours, you have to think that something like the Obama Street pool with so many photos is a pretty incredible thing. All the signs were removed -- the last by the city DPT -- by noon, inauguration day.

People loved them. They posed with them all over San Francisco with pride.

I have no idea how many or who did all of it (I heard stories told over beers at a downtown bar around midnight), but I did hear that there were not one, but *two* groups unknown to each other -- who ironically crossed paths when the early group started early and caught the Obama worm.

That's our city for you: great minds prank alike. And you should only get caught if you're doing something that makes the officers smile. (UR doin it right.) Someone called cactusthesaint made a set called Municipal Improvement showing they'd photographed the entire street -- you can tell by looking at the block numbers on the signs. Amazing! Their work, below:

These are showing up around town this week; and how do we feel? I saw another one that added an "s" to "Bag." Excellent!

Seeing this today reminded me of all the times I've been given tickets for offenses that were clearly the officer's inability to read, say, my legal, registered and paid for parking permit. And how hard it is to "protest" a ticket: you have to pay it anyway while you protest while the fines rack up. I'll never say assault is the answer, I'm just saying that something's broken, and these fresh-looking stickers on all the DPT vehicles I saw today made me think -- I know we all have a story, and it's cost us money.

In my opinion, this was the best local prank of 2008. It was back in February, 14th and Valencia, courtesy of the Billboard Liberation Front.

It's always amazing to see urban exploration in abandoned, historic landmarks: photographer Thomas Hawk has been making trips to the Fleishhacker Pool House and shooting the street art and creepy Eastern European wasteland-feeling space. But it's not in Europe at all; it is, in fact, beneath the parking lot of the San Francisco Zoo.

The pool was opened in 1925 by an eccentric millionaire who wanted to make the biggest swimming pool in the US -- and he did. There's an excellent, extensive post about it at Terrastories (vintage image via), who tell us:

Throughout its five-decade history as a public swimming destination, Fleishhacker would be the setting of San Francisco's most unique lores and legends; there was the story of the shark being sucked in through the 200-foot-long intake pipe coming from the ocean, a stove discovered in the deep end of the pool when it was drained for maintenance, and the disembodied hand reportedly found by a gardener, floating in the pool.
But the real amazing facts reside in the sheer size of the pool - 1000 feet long, over 150 feet wide, and 13 feet deep at its deepest point. The pool held 6,000,000 gallons of ocean water, continually cleaned once every six weeks by becoming completely drained and sweeped and pumped clean. It had a capacity of 10,000 people. Years after its construction, when Fleishhacker was asked by one of the pool's lifeguards why he had built such a large pool, he responded by telling the lifeguard to swim the entire length. When the lifeguard returned, he responded, "Did anyone get in your way?" The lifeguard said no; and Fleishhacker promptly replied, "That's why."

Its history is also rife with stories about 1920's and 30s movie stars such as Johnny Weismuller, Esther Williams and Ann Curtis. But now all that's left is the pool house, which now looks more like a colorful haunted house for taggers. I want to go there...

This empty lot and beat up Victorian had the "Progress" paste-up put on it a long time ago. I wonder if the xmas tree lot is more popular for it. I like that they worked it into the signage.

Funny story: so, I'm at the holiday party for the Internet Archive. I'm standing at this table, holding this orb from the Long Now Foundation, which is a gift from Long Now to Brewster at the Archive. The orb opens up; I unscrewed it to reveal a disk and beneath that, a hollow space containing a metal scroll with Brewster's name inscribed on it.

Standing at the table with me is the woman from Long Now (who had just presented the orb onstage) and a journalist, from I think, some CBS affiliate. The conversation went like this:

He: It's beautiful.
She: Thank you.
He: Except there's one thing.
She: What?
He: You spelled Brewster's name wrong.

:: pause ::

She, firmly: No, we did not.
He: Yes, actually you did. (He moves to show her.)
She, very firmly: *Give* me that.

* The orb was re-assembled, without the scroll.

Over at SmugBlog they have a great post about their trial runs playing with their new video cameras in First 1080p video from Canon's new 5D MkII - Amazing! (blogs.smugmug.com). The best part is the resulting video; shot just about two weeks ago, it gives you a real view of San Francisco as it is right now, all decked out for the holidays, and more. Great soundtrack, guys! Unfortunately the player isn't embeddable, but I highly recommend that you click through and watch it in full-screen mode to see every detail, from Union Square to the Castro.

One of my all time favorite books is Herbert Asbury's The Barbary Coast: it's full of crime, violence, politics, sex and gambling and genderfuckery in the mud of San Francisco's birth -- not to mention brothels of *all* kinds, running Mormons out of town (think this was the first time with Prop 8?) and Hearst. Right now in the 'upper playground' or Lower Haight or the Hate'stro or the Staight-ho -- whatever you call it, a gallery called FIFTY24SF is featuring the stunning artwork of Jeremy Fish and Miss Van. Jeremy Fish in "Ghosts of the Barbary Coast".

Juxtapoz pre-blogged it, then went to the opening (images via). Because they are art whores. And we love them. They say,

Through his research, Fish found that SF is a city "built on an adventurous pioneer spirit, which you can still see traces of in contemporary San Francisco. It's that magnetism this city has to that adventurous personality that I am building on." Through his pieces, Fish resurrects the San Francisco of the past, a time when "young men and women were finding millions in gold, just as fast as they lost it at the gambling table, or to a thief."

Jeremy takes us to bars of the past such as "The Fierce Grizzly" (that actually featured a live female bear chained to the wall), or "The Boars Head" (where a woman performed sexual acts with a pig). The San Francisco that Jeremy Fish explores is one with 24-hour pharmacies selling single-dose intoxicants to patrons of The Coast at all hours. This was certainly not the norm in the U.S. in 1850, but "this was the dawn of the west coast."

It is Fish and Van's "love letter" to the Barbary Coast days and over 35 pieces are on display -- images in this post are by Miss Van (top) and Fish (above). The show is from December 4-30, Tuesday-Sunday from 12-6 PM, and by appointment at 252 & 248 Fillmore Street.