Inauguration Panorama, Before, During and After
A fellow iPhone Panorama user made these on the Mall in DC. Just like we think of ancient Romans with the scrub-brush helmets and the 18th century British with those wigs, thousands of years from now they will think of Americans with hoodies and baseball caps.
One week later:
Ahhh, DC, so nice in both winter and summer — I can only survive there for about a week in the spring and the fall (but only two American Apparels — freedom reigns!)
And then there’s the super-zoomable monster Obama-panorama (2GB!) (warning — not taken with an iPhone…)
One nice thing about DC is The Mall — it would be nice to have a flat, open empty space to more effectively protest and celebrate in SF. Chrissy Field is too bumpy. For now, 19th and Valencia it is.
BART Adventure, Mystery Music
So I get to work downtown for two days — this is very exciting as it lets me avoid a car and pretend to be a BART commuter like sexpigeon (but with no pithy picture titles). Click to behold my fellow passengers.
At Powell Street Station this dude was playing some guitar.
(audio-only video file below)
But what song is he playing? I KNOW this song, gaaahhhh. It’s driving me nuts. “And it’s you, you keep my thoughts worth thinking… you make this old man’s life worth living… right before things might happen… for me and forever will you stay…”
It sounds like a Colin Hay song, but I’ll be damned if I can find anything online — is he just making shit up? Where’s the music from?
Sadly the recording misses his most excellent 30 second intro, but I take solace in his box of “Crispy Hexagons”. Nothing quite like starting the morning with a box of Euclidean geometry.
Missionorama
Another Mission iPhone panorama from on top of Bernal, higher resolution than the one I made a few months back. Wraps from Twin Peaks / Sutro Tower to McLaren Park / Excelsior.
Click to zoom, 7000 pixels wide.
More dramatic lighting and fluffier clouds, and I think the hills provide nice bookends, but it doesn’t extend as far into Noe as the last one (where I sort of cheated by standing on different parts of Bernal to wrap around — too damn windy and cold up there this afternoon…)
Some detailed slices – Shotwell, Bay Bridge + Hospital Curve, 101/280 + Candlestick
Here’s the rough field of view for things farther out – Mt. Tam, Golden Gate Bridge, Angel Island, Bay Bridge, Berkeley, Oakland, Brisbane, San Bruno Mountain.
That, or Pac Man is attacking San Francisco — after all, it has happened before. (This also reminds me of the funniest pie chart joke ever.)
One of these days I’ll do a 360, but it will have to wait until the sun gets higher in the sky at noon.
Sign over Mission, Fog over Bernal
Yes We Can (Eat)
Huuuge MSF line (go SFgate!) but worth the wait.
They handed out chiccarones as snacks to those waiting outside.
The cornbread and panna cotta was astounding. And Slocombe sure knows their ice cream.
Three Germans and a Frenchman I work with were in town and I dragged them along. MSF now has international approval:
- The Germans loved the Beans and Weenies (yeah, Germans and sausages, I know. But ironically they like the beans the best.) Rocky Road doesn’t translate well but they figured it out pretty quickly.
- Of the whole thing, the Frenchman said “It’s… original. But it’s wonderful. Worth the wait. Four stars.” This was before the mind-blowing cornbread and panna cotta. I think he would have bumped it up at that point but they don’t like fractions, and apparently you don’t give multiple stars for the food? Anyway, he approved — France loves America again!
Benton and his bacon — no pictures, you know what that means. Damn. Brain melting indeed.
The chicken was the surprise of the night — didn’t expect it as a sandwich. Kick-ass spicy. It worked. We welcome our new sandwich to the MSF family!
Pictures by a real photographer over at Beer & Nosh.
Obama Street
A buddy of mine took this picture of Bush Street newly renamed.
More here and here. I like “Obama Avenue” myself.
Eye on Blogs has a pointer to Plug1’s most appropriate unadulterated Bush Street Sign:
End Of The World As We Knew It, But I Feel Fine
Chrissy Field, Golden Gate Bridge
All taken on an iPhone using Panorama. Click to zoom (WordPress limits me to 500 pixels, and the panoramas below are 2000, 3000 and 5000 pixels wide.)
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I shot this one left to right, accidentally catching this family in at least 5 of the shots, maybe a couple more (see if you can find the green jacketed girl’s demi-appearance).
MSF in the Chron, Burrito Justice is a ‘Food Blog’ (Who Knew?)
Great review of MSF in the Chronicle. (Apparently I am a “food blog”. Thus the previous post on floating airliners and panorama software, sure fooled them!)
Sadly my mastery of no-rez photography excluded my images from print. (Seriously — the Chronicle asked for a “higher rez version”, and I’m like, “dude, that IS the high rez…”) Props to Jesse for his mastery of an actual camera and inclusion in a printed publication.
Most interesting part of the article:
For his part, Myint thinks he’s hit on a model that can last. He recently gave notice at Bar Tartine to focus more on Mission Street Food. Is he getting rich from this venture? He says the money works out to “roughly the equivalent of what overtime pay would be, for an experienced cook.” Then again, it’s not about the money.
Hooray for MSF! Maybe this means another day a week? (Pure unadulterated speculation on my part…)
As for next week, oh dear god, I think my head just exploded:
BBBLT: Braised Benton’s Bacon, Lettuce, Baked Tomato, Aioli on a homemade flatbread – $6.
Ahhh, yes, Señor Benton returns with his Bacon lovingly wrapped in flatbread. Who can’t say no to this?
This should be a good one, as I’m bringing a bunch of guys from my company’s overseas offices to eat this beautiful creation. (And Great Scott, fried chicken!)
Rinse, Lather, Repeat – 1968, JAL Splashes Down Off SFO; 1962, Aeroflot in St. Petersburg
In November 1968, a JAL DC-8 missed the runway by two miles and landed in San Francisco Bay, but all survived and there were no injuries. Sound familiar?
JAL DC-8 off SFO
Look familiar?
There was fog and Captain Asoh was 200 feet lower than he thought. He took full responsibility, but the best part was his quote to the NTSB:
“As you Americans say, I fucked up.”
The NTSF accident report is online.
The water was shallow and landing gear kept most of the plane above the Bay. United was able to revive the plane at their SFO repair facility and billed JAL $4 million (about $25 million in today’s dollars) who flew it for another 14 years. It then operated for airlines in the Caribbean and Nigeria, and finally Airborne Express which flew it until 2001. More history here, including pictures of it being torn into scrap.
Sadly, it seems Captain Asoh committed suicide a few years later after being demoted to cargo runs. (This doesn’t seem to be the case.)
Most people have seen the footage of the hijacked flight landing in the water off the Comoros, but here’s one that I had never heard of before – in the USSR in 1963, an Aeroflot TU-124 ran out of fuel and landed in the river in St. Petersburg — everyone survived, only some injuries.
Back in the USSR, Dont Know How Lucky You Are
Of course, the Soviet authorities covered it up and confiscated all the cameras they could find, but I guess these folks got away with their film. Click on the logs to see more photos. (From English Russia, a pretty interesting blog with lots of photos about Russia, new and old.)
p.s. It feels very weird typing “USSR” and “Soviet”.
Girafa We Can Believe In
Stick Out Your Long Neck For Change
Burrito Justice 
