Towse: views from the hill

January 15, 2007

Corner of Lombard and Hyde

Filed under: photographs,real estate,San Francisco — Towse @ 4:33 pm

Don wasn’t quite sure where he’d been the other day, when he wished he’d had his camera with him.

I suspect he was at the corner of Lombard and Hyde. [photos follow]

Yesterday we spent our Sunday afternoon doing the usual: looking at

(1) quaint studio cottage on Kearny, just south of Filbert, ‘neath Coit Tower. Cobbled together from four earthquake cottages. Sold furnished. $779K. No parking, of course. No views.

(2) 401 Union St #101. A nice 1BR/1BA condo at Union and Kearny. Parking. $595K, which comes to a price per sq ft of $792.28. Agent said he already had two prospective offers and another agent was bringing by a client. Good deal, he said, in a nice neighborhood, when I asked him what he really thought of the price.

(3) $6.5m house for sale up on Russian Hill (owner, she of Legally Blonde, has moved to LA). For $6.5m I’d expect a more dazzling view than just interrupted snippets of the Golden Gate Bridge. Nice roof deck. Sound system throughout. Lovely wood floors. Delightful custom artwork on the walls of the young child’s room. (Owl and the Pussycat, Dish and Spoon, piggies, &c.) Far more bookcases that I usually see in a house, but … $6.5m? I don’t care if it is huge and historic, a Pueblo Revival house designed by Charles F. Whittlesey, one of the houses on Russian Hill built for Norman Banks Livermore. THERE IS NO ZILLION DOLLAR VIEW. This place is not worth $6.5m without a view.

Wandered further until it was time to head home before heading out to dinner.

These photos were taken yesterday (Sunday) from the corner of Lombard (that crookedest street) and Hyde (where the Hyde Street Cable Car runs down to the Bay). Sunny day. I happened to have my camera with me.

Click on photos for larger images.

Looking east toward Telegraph Hill. You can see the red cranes behind Yerba Buena Island and the new Bay Bridge eastern span under construction. Cone-shaped Mount Diablo in the far distance.

Looking north toward Alcatraz.

If the day had been slower, if there hadn’t been cars barreling up Hyde from the Bay and cars inching onto Lombard from three directions, if I hadn’t had my doubts whether people would notice me standing in their way, I would’ve done what some other hardy souls did, I would’ve stood in the middle of Hyde to take the picture of Alcatraz, but, instead, you get this picture with a bit of tree on both sides.

Lovely day, though.

January 14, 2007

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

Filed under: blog,wordstuff — Towse @ 8:46 am

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

[via tnh at Making Light]

January 13, 2007

GeoGreetings from the Hill

Filed under: app — Towse @ 10:01 pm

Click on image for full effect.

GeoGreetings creates custom online greeting cards using building images found with Google Maps. Jesse Vig, the cool app provider, is looking for help finding more buildings that look like letters.

Thanks! to Jesse Vig, cool app provider at GeoGreeting, and to Stacy of She Dreams In Digital for the headzup.

[URL] WikiLeaks

Filed under: URL,webstuff — Towse @ 9:23 pm

How to leak a secret and not get caught – WikiLeaks from New Scientist Tech, 12 Jan 2007.

wikileaks.org

Good? Worthwhile?

Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide. Wikileaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability. They will be able to interpret documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document comes from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document arrives from Iran, the entire Farsi community can analyze it and put it in context.

I give it a month before WikiLeaks is either so full of garbage as to be useless or the able meta monitors start shutting down “undesirable” wiks and creating WikiLeaks’ own form of censorship.

(Cool logo, though …)

APOD: 2007 January 13 – Comet Over Krakow

Filed under: photographs,science,URL — Tags: — Towse @ 8:56 pm

APOD: 2007 January 13 – Comet Over Krakow

Almost caught it this morning, but the sun had already tipped up above the eastern foothills by the time I got out of bed. Headed off to Liguria Bakery for rosemary focaccia and rosemary/garlic focaccia in lieu. Ym.

Frederic Larson caught an interesting glimpse of the McNaught a couple days ago.

Update: Keera snapped it too!

Update 2: More on McNaught from msnbc.

[URL] Mathematical Quotation Server

Filed under: quotation,URL — Towse @ 8:23 pm

Mathematical Quotation Server from Mark Woodward and the Furman University (SC) mathematics department.

Keyword Search – Alpha by Author – Browse – Download – Random

Text references given when known.

Apocryphal Babbage quotation?

Filed under: quotation — Towse @ 8:20 pm

Even if so, I like this:

On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

– Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

[URL] World Cultures – an overview

Filed under: information,URL — Towse @ 7:57 pm

From WSU, the archived coursework and resources for the university freshman-level World Cultures class.

Texts, maps, &c. Ignore the “available for distance learning registation” [sic] notices and the links to discussion areas. This site is archival only.

Want to read up on Bhagavad-Gita? You’ll find yourself here. Click “contents” and you’ll get to an online text (a downloadable version is also available) or click “resources” and you’ll get a list of hyperlinks to other online texts, essays, commentaries and such like.

While away the afternoon.

No search functionality, alas.

(Found when searching for the etymology of “no retreat, no surrender” — the title of DeLay’s new book– which drew me toward Sparta, which brought me here. Could any of the erudite readers reading this tell me whether there was a Spartan rule which translated as “no retreat, no surrender”? Thanks much.)

This is just so wrong, in so many ways: fourthmeal.com

Filed under: food,peeves — Towse @ 6:33 am

I was down in the south Bay today, making sure the parental abode in East San Jose would survive the expected frigid temperatures. We’d basically shut down the heat after my mom moved on to save $$$, but his nibs was afraid the pipes would burst if the temps dropped as low as expected.

(Woo hoo! Temps in the 20s expected. We haven’t had temps this low since The Great Freeze of 1989. Yesterday, in anticipation, we moved the jade plants and herbs into the house. Did you know the blossoms on jade plants had a pungent smell? I didn’t. Now I do.)

The younger sib was taking the train in to work and wouldn’t have a car available to check on the parental abode and rather than ask him to change his plans, I drove down, set the heat, pumped a bit from the pool cover, piled things in piles, shifted nine bags of clothes/towels/sheets/&c. to the Goodwill and … had lunch with his nibs.

Lunch was our usual (if not Thai Orchid) place: Taco Bell. Fears of green onion? chopped lettuce? E.coli? Death? Not us. Death by Chalupa, maybe.

Call me totally unaware. We don’t watch TV, so we don’t get the commercials. We don’t pay much attention to print ads.

Today at Taco Bell, I was introduced to the ad theme of “the fourth meal. … the meal between dinner and breakfast.”

You know that meal … the meal that makes 127 million Americans overweight, and 60 million obese. (*)

There’s even a very lame Web site — very lame I say because I tried it because I wanted to see what was being offered, and …why? Why have this site at all? I exited about three clicks into the experience.

The thing that bothers me most about all this is the Taco Bell ad agency thinking it would be a great idea to convince folks who eat at Taco Bell that a fourth meal between dinner and breakfast is not an aberration and “munchies” (uh.oh.) but an ‘onest-to-gosh extra meal in the day that everyone knows about and eats and you should too.

Bad enough I eat chalupas at lunch: ghod spare me from the day when I think a mid-evening “meal” of chalupas is nothing out of the ordinary, nothing I ought to be having second thoughts about.

fourthmeal?

That copy writer ought to have zir mouth washed out with soap.

Whoever designed the Web site needs a spanking, too.

January 11, 2007

[URL] Double-Tongued Dictionary: Slang, jargon, and new words from the fringes of English.

Filed under: URL,wordstuff — Towse @ 7:51 pm

From Grant Barrett, lexicographer for The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, Double-Tongued Dictionary: Slang, jargon, and new words from the fringes of English.

RSS feed or just wander. Comments are entertaining too.

e.g. cheddar curtain n. the divisions real and imagined that separate Wisconsin from neighboring states, especially Illinois. Also cheese curtain. Related: Sconnie, Wisconsin, English

Editorial Note: This term is parellel [sic] to Orange curtain, cotton curtain, and other, similar terms.

Citations: 1992 Chicago Sun-Times (Aug. 7) “The Mix” p. 5: Lift the cheddar curtain. The Wisconsin State Fair celebrates its 100th year in its current location at State Fair Park in West Allis, Wis., through Aug. 16. 1993 [Julian Macassey] Usenet: alt.tasteless (Nov. 10) “Re: Tasteless Secret Santa”: At that time of year (Feb, March), I will probably be in Wisconsin. So I will fly back from behind the Cheddar curtain. 1994 [Bob Christ] Usenet: alt.tasteless (Jan. 14) “Re: Rock ‘n Roll for geezers”: He’s done it! Julian has moved behind the cheese curtain. 1994 [Joseph Betz] Usenet: talk.bizarre (Oct. 12) “Re: Longest Known Palindrome”: Wisconsin—Behind the Cheese Curtain. 2003 A. Forester Jones Yellow Snow (June) p. 65: The pilot announced that they had crossed the “Cheddar Curtain” and were over Wisconsin. Adam started visually searching the land below for large warehouses stuffed with surplus cheese. 2005 Northwest Herald (Chicago) (May 23) “Don’t let road work ruin travel”: People heading to Wisconsin can find information about road construction behind the cheddar curtain by logging onto http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov. 2006 Bike Black Ribbon (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) (Nov. 19) “BBRS Ride with the Bums”: Mid November, behind the cheese curtain is not known for its balmy climes or great trail conditions, but this particular November day turned out to be dry, with a few peaks at blue sky.

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