Fireworks! Kaboom! Zoweee!
Thank you to the ghods of baseball. Beautiful.
I’d’ve snapped pics but the camera is um. dyspeptic when it comes to fireworks.
I wish there was a service that could nudge me when there are upcoming fireworks displays.
There were =no= boats out on the bay for tonight’s ‘works. We might’ve walked down to the piers if we’d known they were happenin’.
Regarding my real estate lust for 1417 15th St and my lack of $3.25m to spare, Christine commented: Monthly payments of $21,600. Now that is just unimaginable.
The monthly payments include mortgage (after a $650K down payment), insurance AND taxes. What a bargain.
But say you don’t have $650K for a down payment and you want a really nice place, good location (even though it’s near impossible to walk to any place that serves dinner and parking is extra).
You could lease the commander’s house at the Presidio: 7 bedrooms, 4.5 baths. Nice large public rooms with space for HUGE parties for all your friends. A large basement. Restored. 4100 sq ft. “Only” $15K/month.
Rent.
For your $15K/month you get a space to set your worldly goods. You have no equity. You earn no equity out of your monthly payment. You get no property tax write-off. You get no nothing, except for a lovely place to stay.
In fact, the Presidio leases its prime buildings like this at whatever the traffic will bear, so $15K/month is just the base rate. If two people want the place, they can bid up the lease price even higher.
Ah, the American Way.
Sure, I know. The game isn’t until Tuesday, but we already have the Goodyear blimp circling around between the ballpark (hidden behind the Embarcadero Center towers) and the pyramid.
Labeled “THE GREATEST OBITUARY EVER” by Poor Mojo Newswire
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.
When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous “glamour” charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
[… Continues]
“Well? Did you climb?” Arleen asked. …
Back on July 4th, I wrote both here and on Twitter about the primo closeby viewing spot: the roof of the building next door. To get to it I’d have to climb up onto our roof, step across to the neighbors’ roof and then reverse the process (after dark) to get back to safety.
Did I finally in the end do it?
No.
I’m not terrific with heights to begin with. I’m not terrified, exactly. I just have lousy balance and a vivid imagination (and a fear of winding face smack on the ground).
The maneuver is relatively easy for someone with a good head for heights, which I don’t have, but my situation is made even less comfortable by my imagination, which has me tripping clumsily, losing my balance and falling into the lightwell between the buildings and landing, body broken, five stories down with no way to get out of the lightwell except to have rescuers on the roof with ropes to haul me back out.
Um. So, no.
I had climbed up on our roof while it was still light out. From there to the neighbor’s roof is (relatively) easy peasy and shivered me timbers. I had a nerve wracking time turning around and backing down the high ladder that had taken me to the rooftop to begin with.
I did watch from the north-facing bedroom window. For the major part of the fireworks, the view was okay, more than okay being as I was watching from within the safety of my place.
If you look carefully at the pictures, you can see the buildings to the west of us that block views of the fireworks, you can see a glowing blob on the left side of the picture which is a blurry Alcatraz, you can see a zillion lights from the thousands (it seems, at least) of boats that are out in the Bay for the fireworks, and you can see our neighbors’ fire escape, which also blocks the fireworks views a bit.
The roof really is a cleaner more spectacular view, but …
The fireworks barge, however, was drifting east, probably due to an incoming tide. As the show went on, I had to crane my head further and further to the west (left) to keep the fireworks in view.
Finally, our neighbors’ building blocked the view so much that I went out onto the deck (on the east side of the same level) and craned my head east and watched as the barge and its fireworks slowly came into better view. My view was pretty good for the finale. Not as good as the view his nibs and one of the neighbors were having from the roof, but good enough for this scaredy cat.
We watched legal and illegal fireworks on the Embarcadero and the east edge of town, on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena and at points in the East Bay for another hour or so before calling it a night.
For Villaraigosa: Sex, lies and eyes that pry – commentary by Timothy Rutten in the LA Times.
Is this affair a newsworthy tidbit? Is it any business of ours? Is it the business of people who watch Salinas on Telemundo or who live in the city for which Villaraigosa is mayor?
Is it newsworthy only as relates to whether Salinas should’ve kept covering the news? Had she told her bosses about the relationship? Does it matter whether Salinas and Villaraigosa were “just friends” or lovers? If she told her bosses “just friends” and not “lovers,” should that have affected the limits her bosses put on her reportage?
Oh, the questions, the reckless behavior, the conflict-of-interest.
Does it even matter except as a way of selling the news in an industry where the more news sold the better?
My favorite part of Rutten’s commentary is his reprise of the late Abe Rosenthal’s standard in such cases:
It doesn’t matter if a reporter sleeps with elephants, so long as they don’t cover the circus.
This week’s visitor has its Fourth of July flags flying.
Still trying to decide whether to try climbing on the roof to watch the fireworks this year. Last year I chickened out when I saw how far the drop down from the edge was. No railings!
The current issue of Northside (not available online, alas) features a cover photo and a profile of Maurice Kanbar, inventor, philanthropist, &c.
Who he? I thought.
Turns out back when he was a young man, Kanbar (who is no longer a young man) invented and patented the D-Fuzz-It sweater comb and made a packet.
Later, Kanbar patented the Safety Glide hypodermic needle protector, a cryogenic cataract remover and the Tangoes puzzle game. He also launched New York’s first multiplex theatre back when and, in 1992, founded SKYY Spirits, LLC, corporate home to SKYY Vodka.
He’s had his successes and also his failures. Renaissance Man or just having fun?
He doesn’t work, he says. If you enjoy what you’re doing, it’s not work.
Kanbar has made a pocketful of change. The article profiles his passions and his philanthropy. If you can find a copy of Northside, read the article.
254 homes destroyed. According to the Stanford update, all of the camp staff members with houses in the area came through with houses intact.
Cause of fire: illegal campfire in an area where campfires are never never ever allowed.
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