Blurgh

The Daily Blurgh: Caged tigers I have known

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

SF may put the “booooo” back in booze: “San Francisco could become California’s first city and county to tax booze — about a nickel a drink — in an effort to recover taxpayer health care costs for alcohol abusers.”

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RIP: SF Zoo’s Tony the Tiger.

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Architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro was picked yesterday by the UC Berkeley to design the university’s new art and film complex that will house the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive. Does that mean DS+R are still in the running to design SFMOMA’s planned expansion?

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Palin PWND in ethics probe (but, sadly, at this point, isn’t $390,000 just chump change to her?).

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“Though Mr. Tabbert, 28, personally prefers G-star denim and concert tees, he was on the hunt for 150 dishdashas, the ankle-length garments worn by men in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. In July, actors will wear them in a simulated Iraqi village, posing as townspeople, clerics and insurgents at a National Guard training ground in the Midwest.”

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A gallery of Klubstitute fliers from SF’s gay 90s.

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In honor of the late Tony and the gay high holidays that are upon us, here is some feline pride from France:

The Daily Blurgh: Gay ice cream, straight bears, sun songs

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

The California foothills are alive with “extremely high levels of lead, arsenic and asbestos.”

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Russian gajillionaire pledges to financially support rotting historic pile Fort Ross.

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“Goooooooooal!” is the word at Civic Center.

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“On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.”

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The gayest ice cream ever?

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Shocker: White shoes not such a good idea on a crowded dance floor.

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Straight bears: newfound allies or cuddly cockteasers?

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The music of the sun out-blasts THX any day.

The Daily Blurgh: Grifter raccoons, literary subway stations, the Streep!!!

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Beware of teary raccoon eyes when in Davis.

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It’s no battleship Potemkin but the cruiser Varyag, which recently docked in our waters, is no slouch. Neither is its “relaxation cabin.”

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Speaking of Russia, a Moscow metro station was recently made-over in honor of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the morbid results sound both hideous and captivating:

“The station, called Dostoyevskaya, is decorated with brooding grey and black mosaics that depict violent scenes from the 19th-century writer’s best-known novels. One mural re-enacts the moment when the main character in Crime and Punishment murders an elderly pawnbroker and her sister with an axe.”

Maybe BART or MUNI could follow suit? They could have so much fun with Hammett, Norris, or Maupin.

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“Let’s don’t burlesque this,” to become the new, “don’t get it twisted?”

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Ladies and gentleman, unsung gay icon and artist James Bidgood: “I guess people expect me to be lounging around in a silk caftan, face powdered and roughed with twenty yards of orchid chiffon draped around my neck with my bong and a few boys by my pool! Very often guests like yourself think I only work in this slum dwelling, but I live here! There is so little room, I sleep on a twin mattress twice as old as you are, half of which is occupied by a six-foot plaster male store mannequin. I use it to build paper mache forms on and for draping costumes because a regular dressmaker form doesn’t work for the kind of costumes I make, if ya get my meanin’! There’s nowhere else left to put the damn thing, so I got a man in bed with me every night – where he’s of no use at all, like sleepin’ with a cold corpse!”

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The end of the rainbow? SF Pride “bans” openly gay DJs due to sponsorship with Clear Channel.

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Mid-century architectural madness revealed in Presidio Heights.

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Happy birthday, Meryl. May you remain forever young:

The Daily Blurgh: Corpse flower is not a ’90s Goth band

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

I would love to hear what Judge Judy would say to the Petaluma mother who, passed out after drinking tequila, let her 2-year-old daughter wander out of her house. Barefoot. Oy.

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Where exactly is the Tenderloin?

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These are the people in your neighborhood: Mythbusters host Adam Savage has moved to the Mission.

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“Porn is like sausage, it tastes better when you don’t see how it’s made.” Thankfully, SFBG alum Josh Rotter went to a local, ahem, sausage factory so you wouldn’t have to.

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I hope this sort of thing never happens in San Francisco.

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Even if it didn’t have such a fucking cool name, you should still check out the rare Corpse Flower at the UC Botanical Garden. It’s supposed to be in full bloom around July 1st, but will only stay open for a day or two.

The Daily Blurgh: Ethnic Frensing, a bear suns in Oakland

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Fake trend alert! “Ethnic Frensing.” Quick! Get it into circulation before Tyra Banks tries to copyright it.

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WTF Headline of the day: “Ghoulish cargo of 60 severed heads found at airport.

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Couldn’t the Chronicle‘s editors have worked a “crypt keeper” pun into this profile of UC Santa Cruz’s resident Grateful Dead scholar?

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Fantasy casting the inevitable BP oil spill movie. (But no Kevin Costner???).

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Welcome Oakland’s newest ursine resident, Pagi.

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Is demonstrating part of “The Berkeley Experience?”

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Anthony Bourdain on Alice Waters: “I respect her, but … well, that’s comedy gold, let’s put it that way …” Amen.

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Mission Street Food to try its hand at “Americanized Oriental Food.” Bring on the free range Egg foo young!

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Stay cool this weekend:

The Daily Blurgh: Frat douches, crank callers, Marx on soccer

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Meg Whitman’s son is an asshat (surprised?).

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City passes moibile phone radiation law. As if you didn’t already know that your iThing was going to cause ear cancer.

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Report finds that UC Berkeley mishandled the police response to student protests in November. This wouldn’t be the first time.

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People have too much time on their hands: “Prosecutors say 53-year-old Kurtis Thorsted broadcast more than four dozen hoax distress signals over six months in 2008, costing the Coast Guard more than $102,000 for attempted searches. Thorsted pleaded guilty to broadcasting the “mayday” calls from his Salinas home and telling would-be rescuers he was stranded in an offshore kayak.”

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Terry Eagleton on soccer is no where near as fun as Roland Barthes on wrestling.

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Speaking of the World Cup, that buzzing sound you keep hearing during matches isn’t an incoming swarm of killer bees. Rather, its your new favorite spelling bee challenge: the vuvuzela.

 

The Daily Blurgh: Stakeout on 6th Street, Twilight tribute bands, tipsy artists

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay

Thomas Kinkade: “painter of light,” shameless boozehound. (Also: Doesn’t the mugshot totally make him look like a champion poker player or a washed up bookie? I always thought he would be more Bob Ross than Hunter S. Thompson).

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Ozzy Osbourne has donated his body to science. Will Keith Richards follow suit?

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The Bold Italic spends 24 hours on 6th Street.

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Drinking game: Do a shot for every one of the local watering holes that made Esquire‘s Best Bars in America list that you’ve been to.

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Save the date – The Cullens, the best Twlight tribute band you’ve never heard of, are set to play at the SF Public Library’s Richmond branch this Sunday. Twihardcore for life!

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Bigfoot lives, loves old-timey candy bars.

 

The Daily Blurgh: Poisoned fruit cocktails, tipsy crafts

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

The moral imperative of the BP oil spill: Drive 20 percent less.

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Former gourmet chocolatier goes vegan.

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The crafting potential of the mini bar is limited only by your imagination/liver.

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Local punks clean up on Broadway’s big night

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What makes that children’s juice drink so delicious? Lead!

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Apple isn’t into (male) cartoon nudity or gay sexiness. What prudes.

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Wanna be the Greyson Chance of the art world? Then get to work! The Guggenheim is scouting Youtube for the next Ryan Trecartin. How democratic.

The Daily Blurgh: Debauched Pride memories, extreme dog makeovers

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Local, notable queers reminisce about their first Pride experiences.

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A breakdown of Berkeley’s food Meccas.

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The Kardashian bikini paradox. Mind-blowing.

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A guide for those who don’t know squat about the World Cup (but were afraid to ask).

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I, Hoarder: A Washington Post writer comes out of the clutter closet.

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Streetsblog debates “accessibility” versus “mobility” as a human right.

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The weather is supposed to be gorgeous this weekend, but if you dare to get sucked into Chronologically LOST you just might wind up housebound. As the project’s super-ambitious/freak genius creator writes:

“Chronologically LOST is a project I have undertaken to present the show LOST in its entirety in chronological order.  That means taking every flashback, flash forward, and flash sideways, extracting them from the present day storyline, and creating one big timeline, that starts with the earliest flashbacks of the island, and goes through all the way to the end of the series in…well, I guess the end doesn’t really have a specific date.”

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I’ve always wanted a fluffy dog… so I could dye it to look like another animal?!?!

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And just because it’s Friday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIc9b4A-cO8

The Daily Blurgh: Pissed librarians, neighborhood art, zoo babies

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

I want my LGBTV! Prop 8 Trial closing arguments will not be televised.

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Andrei Tarkovsky made a whole lotta gorgeous films. He also took a whole lotta gorgeous Polaroids.  (Thanks Boing Boing).

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Mea Culpa: Sirron Norris offers this sincere, respectful open letter in regard to the mural dispute at 22nd and Mission. Whatever your opinion of his art, there is no denying that the man is all class.

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On the radar: The Bay Citizen previews the new, new media arts fest, City Centered, which kicks off in the Tenderloin starting tomorrow.

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UC librarians to Nature Publishing Group: We aren’t gonna take it!

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Speaking of libraries, the British Library has acquired all the papers of the late, great SF author J.G. Ballard. Lucky them.

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Cute overlords: Baby animals at the SF Zoo!

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“Oh, I’m a singer/ You’re a whore!” (NSFW, duh):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ-2e5CyJgg

The Daily Blurgh: Satanic real estate, erotic math, breast milk

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Education/Sex/Film/Art: UC Berkeley math prof produces and stars in Matthew Barney-like cinematic tribute to Yukio Mishima, has sex on screen to Wagner.

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LGBT/Crime: SF Appeal investigates “hook-up violence” against LGBT folks. Part two is here. Peeps, be safe out there this Pride season!

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Brains/Jobs: SF ranked “smartest” city in the US. Maybe the critical mass of advance degree holders is why it’s still hard to get a job.

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TV/Econ: “The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines.”

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Local Media: The Bay Area can expect to welcome another local media start-up, The Berkeley Times, come this fall.

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Art/Food/Sex: “We had this idea – someone wanted to take our portrait – and I thought it would be funny if we did Riccardo drinking milk from my breasts. Because that’s really what it is, we feed each other. We’re family.”

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Satan/Real Estate: The Richmond District’s Satanic past!

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Transit/Life: Take a ride in the front seat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ0gBsR9w74&feature=player_embedded

The Daily Blurgh: Justice, mad scientists, C.R.E.A.M.

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Assholes: Hit-and-run driver arrested!

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Science: Stanford whiz kids develop buggy-like electric car; resemble Beverly Hillbillies.

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Art: Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” updated for YouTube.

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Economics: Happiness is 60k a year?

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Enviornment: Global warming projected to continue fucking up Nor Cal coasts.

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Ideas: “PROP E-2: For the LAST FUCKING TIME, it is STAND RIGHT, WALK LEFT on the fucking escalator. First offense results in being thrown down the escalator. Second offense is death. If the offender isn’t dead already from being thrown down the escalator the first time. This includes you, grandma, so heads up and look alive. If you’re too grizzled to hoof it up to 24th Street, stand on the fucking right side. Seriously people.”

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Tech: Spoiler alert! Apple to unveil latest iPhone on Monday.

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Lifestyles/Porn:

The Daily Blurgh: Viral kittens, punking BP

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Asshole: “I’d do it again”

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Another asshole: “A man driving a crossover sport utility vehicle hit four bicyclists in the Mission District and Potrero Hill neighborhoods in a six-minute rampage Wednesday night before crashing the vehicle and running away, San Francisco police said.”

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Agitprop: An annotated guide to images from the anti-BP movement.

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Science: All your kittehs belong to the alien virus that makes cats (and the people who love them) do craaaazy things!

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Snark: “20 Young Writers Earn the Envy of Many Others”

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Fashion: Handbags, now with less lead.

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Environment: BYOB (as in non-single-use bag, not beer) is now California law.

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Bummers: RIP Rue McClanahan. Thank you for being a friend (to all the cats):

The Daily Blurgh: Sex spray, tasty jerky

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Local art thief nabbed, ID-ed.

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New spray could help the ‘one minute men’ in your life (and it’s not Axe).

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Looking for a new stereo receiver? Wanna swap that old guitar? Need maracas? The Mission’s Music Flea Market is back this Saturday.

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“Once upon a time, he was a local celebrity. He earned his nickname after doing a tv commercial for a Round Table pizza named The Big Vinny. For over twenty years, he was the face and voice of a successful used car business in small town Alameda. He sold and he sold and he sold and Californians drove away happy. Today, everything has changed. The business is dead. The lots sit empty. Big Vinny is out of work. But he still remembers the good times.”

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Raising children is expensive. Parents, take a tip from Babies and swap out those pre-K math tutoring sessions for a bleached bone.

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Hello? Silent Spring, anyone? “The California Department of Pesticide Regulation has proposed registering methyl iodide as a pesticide in California to the dismay of scientists and environmental groups, who say it is so toxic that even chemists are reluctant to handle it.”

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Local, sustainable, leather-like: Is jerky poised to become the next SF food micro-trend?

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Type dirty to me.

The Daily Blurgh: Gaydar, crafting-as-protest

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Gaydar may actually exist.

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Who do you wanna see at Outside Lands this year? Lord, please let Janelle Monae and Al Green do a duet.

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Berkeley does indeed have a Tea Party: “Rogue knitters encamped along the Berkeley-Oakland border with lawn chairs, tea cakes and knitting projects to protest the city of Berkeley’s order that they remove an 8-foot knitted tea cozy they sewed over the T in a public sculpture they believe insults Oakland.”

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I’m all for going green and buying local but when you describe your business as, “[a] hipster green lifestyle market… celebrating all things cool about being a green localist,” my head can’t but help hit my desk. Go easy on the buzz-speak people.

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Deadly trips at Cow Palace rave.

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RIP Louise Bourgeois. If you haven’t checked out “Mother and Child,” an exhibit of Bourgeois’ recent, maternally-fixated work currently hanging at Gallery Paule Anglim, please do so. There’s also the arachnid pile-up The Nest in SFMOMA’s sculpture garden and Crouching Spider at Pier 14. Peter Orlovsky, poet and longtime companion to Allen Ginsberg, and iconic actor Dennis Hopper also left this plane over the weekend.

The Daily Blurgh: Nasty surf, follicle fetishism

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Could it have been the public urination? ING pulls out as Bay to Breakers sponsor.
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Better wear a wetsuit (and then some). Santa Cruz’s Cowell Beach voted second worst California beach in terms of water quality.


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No more DJs at the Attic?
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“The Olive Centipede was created by Dr. Heiner, a disturbed German bartender formerly famous for his flair garnishing techniques. The evil Dr. Heiner decided to create a garnish centipede, made from sewing three olives together along the olives’ digestive tracts, pit-to-pimento.”
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A blogger dares to ask, “Why is Chinese food in San Francisco so disappointing?” (thanks Eye on Blogs)
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Maybe this creepy fetishist dude could donate his collection of tufts to the efforts to sop up the BP oil using matted hair. Or not.

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Comet dives into the Sun. Cue the Soundgarden:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiSkyEyBczU

The Daily Blurgh: Out of Bolivia, park-ing lessons

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Today in animals: Former circus lions from Bolivia plan SF stopover before cold chillin’ the rest of their days away in sunny San Andreas, crocodile mummies are returned to UC Berkeley, and the American Kennel Club allows mutts (aka “All Americans”) to compete in their own category.

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Rescue 911 — not so great from a cell phone.

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What better way to fight the war on terror than to discredit your enemy than by leaking a “video” of his supposed child-raping conquests?

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So, you wanna build a parklet...
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Headline of the day: “‘I am a predator’ – ruin follows him everywhere

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Crack is whack! (via SFist)

 

The Daily Blurgh: Blue in the face, Twain lives

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Blue is beautiful, but Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue is especially so. Local experts explain why.

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John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey in 1996, is back the news. This time, he is the subject of, “an unofficial nationwide manhunt,” in the face of allegations that he, “has been trying to create a cult of JonBenet Ramsey lookalikes he is calling ‘the Immaculates’ — blond girls as young as 4 years old with small feet — and has been threatening harm to one of the girls, whom he used to recruit others and who escaped from his influence.” Yikes! And the topper: Karr claims to have had sex reassignment surgery within the past two years.

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Mark Twain’s autobiographical writings to be released after century-long wait.

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Small mammal fossils excavated around Shasta County demonstrate that climate change has impacted biodiversity for thousands of years.

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Jews for Jesus founder (and SF resident) Moishe Rosen dies at 78.

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People on poppers.

The Daily Blurgh: No monkey business from Hollywood

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Boooo! SF-set Planet Of The Apes prequel probably won’t be shot in SF.

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Sea lion thinks it’s people!

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See San Francisco in glorious color, thanks to the wonderful online archive of Charles W. Cushman’s Kodachrome slides of the city, shot between 1938 and 1969 (Caliber SF via Eye on Blogs).

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The origins of Mission Carnaval.

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Things women in the news have done recently: impersonated an FBI supervisor, smuggled meth inside a bible, and hid in a coffin to escape custody.

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Richmondsf
takes a tour of the architectural marvel that is the Neptune Society’s Columbarium.

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In honor of the upcoming Harvey Milk Day, here’s a clip of Harvey schooling local, former News Talk host Juana on religious hypocrisy and the Briggs Initiative with plenty of passion and charm:

The Daily Blurgh: Straight talk and space calcium

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Local, totally awesome new media experiment 48 H — a print magazine produced, as its title suggests, in just two days using online social networking and publishing resources — was sent a cease and desist letter by old media dinosaur CBS, which owns the television news magazine 48 Hours. Come on folks. We’re all journalists here. Can’t we all just get along?

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The only dating formula you need.

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It’s hard out there for small to medium-sized museums (especially local ones).

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“[…] Let me start by telling you what it is that sounds ‘straight.’ Straight  actually turns out to be the perfect word to describe what straight guys do. It’s very straight—it has no curlicues, it has no frills or any kind of melodic turns. So they say, ‘Hi. How are you?’ It’s simple, and the lines are very straight, instead of ‘Hi, how are yOOuu?’ You know, women are much more melodic—their voices go up and they go down, and they even move their mouths more. There’s a lot more animation. A straight guy just goes, ‘Hey—this is as much energy and animation as I’m putting out for this thing.'”

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Supernovae: They do a body good?

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Awkward! (Especially considering that tonight was the State Dinner honoring Mexico.)

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Congratulations! Two giant gay metallic penises are your new Olympic mascots, Great Britain.

The Daily Blurgh: Flipper goes commando and Gidget almost loses it (again)

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

In the near future, Navy Marine Mammals will prevent the next diabolical underwater plot hatched by marine-loving terrorists. In fact, they’re doing it off the coast of California right now. Lest you be worried that these aquatic freedom defenders are “canaries in a coalmine” (but in water!), rest assured that, “None of the animals have been harmed in the anti-terrorist work. They never have to carry potentially catastrophic mines.”

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The sexual history of “Gidget.”

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UC Berkeley plans on asking incoming freshman and transfer students to submit DNA samples swabbed from their inner cheeks, “in an effort to introduce them to the emerging field of personalized medicine.” Yeah right. We know that UCB is going to take a page from Philip K. Dick and use the genetic data to blackmail the students when they attempt to do things like go on hunger strikes or protest budget cuts.

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Boing Boing has a neat-o preview of this year’s Maker Faire.

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Garderobe, a word now extinct, went through a similar but slightly more compacted transformation. A combination of “guard” and “robe”, it first signified a storeroom, then any private room, then (briefly) a bedchamber and finally a privy. However, the last thing privies often were was private. The Romans were particularly attached to the combining of evacuation and conversation. Their public latrines generally had 20 seats or more in intimate proximity, and people used them as unselfconsciously as modern people ride a bus.

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Creepiest headline of the day: Slain woman found in suitcase off Embarcadero 

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Most delicious word of the day: “maize’wiches

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Piece of Internet wisdom of the day, courtesy of Slog commenter gloomy gus:

“The internet is 45% sadness, 45% anger, and 10% things to soothe the sadness and anger, meaning: cats and advice.”

 

 

The Daily Blurgh: Creepy mannequins, big words

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

An ode to the creepy child mannequins of Siegel’s Fashions for Men and Boys on Mission.

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“There is nothing postmodern about the electric chair. It takes a living human being and turns him into a piece of meat. Imagine you – you the young journalists of tomorrow – being strapped into an electric chair for a crime you didn’t commit. Would you take comfort from a witness telling you that it really doesn’t make any difference whether you are guilty or innocent? That there is no truth? ‘I think you’re guilty; you think you’re innocent. Can’t we work it all out?'”

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Haight-dwellers, meet SOPA.

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Today, in you can’t make this stuff up: “In 1997, a Mexican woman who was living in Cuernavaca looked at the cover of the magazine Contenido—a Reader’s Digest-y sort of publication—and saw on it the face of her common-law husband. She had been his partner for 21 years and borne him two children, and she knew him as a private detective or ‘CIA agent’ who, for understandable work-related reasons, put in only occasional appearances at home. Now she learned that he was a priest and and that his real name was Marcial Maciel. He was, the magazine said, the head of an order whose strictness and extreme conservatism appeared to hide some vile secrets: the article, picking up information first brought to light in an article by Jason Berry in the Hartford Courant, revealed that nine men, one a founder of the Legionaries, another still an active member, and the rest all former members of the order, had informed their superiors in Rome that Maciel had abused them sexually when they were pubescent seminarians under his care.”

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This sentence cannot be found guilty of the linguistic sin of mytacism.

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Oh yeah. That lumbering mass of drunk people in funny outfits happened Sunday. Brittney Gilbert rounds up web coverage.

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“You’re gonna get all krauty”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q5BWFIx8Ijs