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:
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