Crickets Chirping

This is mostly from an email I sent to David a few months ago while he was still looking for a place to live in SF. I recently heard from another Austinite who is relocating to the Bay Area soon, so I figure why not share my advice with anyone moving from Austin to San Francisco. Here goes:

Okay so I assume you’re wanting to move to SF and not Mountain View. If that’s not the case you can stop reading now.

Good. Mountain View (actually anything south of SF) is booooring.

Food

Here, “Queso” means “assortment of fine cheeses, with fancy french names” If you want the real deal you have to get a block of velveeta and a can of ro-tel tomatoes and make it yourself. Call me if you do that :)

They eat a lot of quinoa, kale, swiss chard, polenta and other rabbit food I never even heard of before I moved out here. If you like that kind of thing, you’re moving to the right place.

SF doesn’t really have its own native cuisine aside from sourdough. There are a lot of really great restaurants here though. Yelp is an exhaustive (if not biased by organized crime :) guide – they have reviews for every square inch of the city.

Everything is crowded. I had a hard time adjusting to the lack of space here, especially coming from Texas. Sometimes I get dinner at Yoshi’s on Fillmore (one of the few places in SF that appreciates space) just to enjoy an entire meal without some stranger bumping his ass against my head as he squeezes by my cramped table. You get used to it after a while though, and kind of get vertigo the next time you eat at a restaurant in Austin :)

No breakfast tacos. I can’t figure this one out. Seems like a no-brainer.

Food carts – we have a lot of them. They tweet their locations.

We have a lot of farmers markets too. I wasn’t into these when I lived in Austin but they’re usually walking distance and they have some great stuff.

If you like beer, you should check out Toronado in the lower Haight, and Monk’s Kettle in the Mission. They have great beer selections.

You can’t get Fireman’s 4 here. So get your fill before you leave. We do have a great IPA called Racer 5 (they have it at Ginger Man and a few other places in Austin).

The most Austin-like bar I’ve been to here is Zeitgeist. The back patio area especially. Reminds me of home.

Local Culture

It’s not quite as “friendly” as Austin but I’ve met some really great people here. Almost everyone who moves to Austin is from Texas. Almost no one who moves to SF is from CA, much less SF. So it’s hard to generalize a bunch of transplants. People here tend to be wealthier than they are in Austin so there’s a bit more snobbery. Having Fine Taste in Things is something of a competitive sport amongst a large chunk of the population.

Craziness: In Austin you have Eeyore’s Birthday. Here, we have Bay to Breakers. And of course Burning Man. That happens in Nevada but it is essentially a San Franciscan event.

I recommend adding SFist to your reader, but don’t expect the same kind of personality exhibited by Austinist. They link to a lot of other blogs I’ve since added to my reader but YMMV.

Live music: Shows sell out here. Plan ahead and buy tickets for any band you want to see in advance. It’s very rare that you can just walk up to anything worth seeing and buy a ticket at the door. Music venues are spread out across the city, not concentrated like they are downtown in Austin.

Movies: There’s nothing comparable to the Alamo Drafthouse here, sadly. Kabuki in Japan Town serves drinks though.

Physical Environs

It’s cold. Like 60-something. But it’s that temperature all year long. The city has microclimates, so that temperature can vary by several degrees depending on which block you’re on. It can be raining like crazy in the upper Haight, and clear and sunny and warm in the Mission. They’re just a couple of miles apart.

My allergies haven’t bothered me much at all, which was fucking awesome after 10 years in Austin.

Another awesome thing is that there are very few insects. You can sit down on the grass in any park here and not be covered in !#$@!#$ fire ants in 10 seconds like you would in Austin. I’ve seen maybe five mosquitos in the past 2.5 years here.

Picking a Neighborhood

If you have a dog – you really want to live near a park. You should also hire a dog walker if you are going to be out of the apartment during the day. I pay $350 a month for mine but you may be able to find someone cheaper.

I lived off of Alamo Square for a year and a half and it’s a good spot for dogs. The “Panhandle” which leads into Golden Gate park is damn near perfect. Close to fun stuff and you can do your walks in the morning and evening pretty quickly.

You may encounter places for rent managed by CitiApartments. They overcharge on rent. The places are nice, they fix them up really well with marble countertops and nice fixtures and shit but they really charge a premium for it. I rented through them my first 1.5 years here and if I had known what I know now I would have gone elsewhere, probably renting from an individual. They required me to supply a Dog Resume. My building manager, who lived above me, was a flamboyantly gay Puerto Rican who did lots of meth. Apparently that combination is a thing here.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, so ping me if you have questions about a particular area.

The Mission is like 78704 x 1,000,000 – sorta. It can actually be cheaper to live there than other parts of the city but it gets kinda sketchy in some areas. If you find anything near Dolores Park, that == WIN. Take it, and bask in the envy. That hood is full of hipsters. Like, hilariously dense with them. Great mexican/south american food, but nothing resembling tex-mex. It’s the sunniest/warmest neighborhood in the city, by far.

Noe (pronounced “no-ee”) Valley: it’s the Florida of the Mission (Sunset/Richmond compete for that title too). Where hipsters go to retire. And raise kids. AKA Stroller Central. My friend Josh lives there and I give him shit for it but it seems like a nice place. Just not a happening part of town.

Castro. You do not have to be gay to live in this neighborhood, but you won’t get to take advantage of all it has to offer unless you are. It’s actually a pretty good location because it’s central and close to all kinds of public transportation. Great bars (not all of them are gay, but yes most of them are), some good restaurants.

Lower Haight reminds me of the North Loop area I used to live in in ATX. It’s cool but it’s also kind of edgy in an anti-hipster way.

Upper Haight is sort of like The Drag or West Campus in that there are a lot of homeless kids backpacking and begging for change amongst the insanely-high-rent-paying locals. Crazy $2MM victorian house with bums pissing in the doorway. I don’t get it. But we have really cool shops in this area and it’s a nightlife destination for lots of people. And everyone is *constantly* trying to sell you weed or ecstasy.

The Sunset, aka shit south of golden gate park. Skip it, there’s nothing there. I mean, you might find a place cheap but you’ll pay for it in the commute. If you do look for a place there, look around 9th and Irving, the sort of hotbed of interesting stuff in the Sunset. Anything close to the N Judah train is probably okay. I brunch at some places around 9th and Irving from time to time but I never go there to hang out at night.

The Richmond. The Sunset’s older sister, aka shit north of Golden Gate park. They’re very similar. Her public transportation options aren’t as good as her little sister’s. Lots of ethnic pockets. The “Real” chinatown is in the Richmond, not in North Beach, as the tourist maps may have you believe. Also, large Russian and Irish neighborhoods.

The Sunset and the Richmond are sort of like the ‘burbs of SF. I knock them but there’s actually some good stuff out there. You just have to travel for-ever to get to it.

Here, Irish bars are actually packed with real life Irish people. And they watch football and drink a lot. They also move your furniture and fix your plumbing and I bet very few of them have their immigration paperwork in order.

Anything west of Divisadero is going to be really foggy in the mornings. In general the further west you go, the colder, drearier it gets.

North Beach: Great Italian and Chinese food. Kinda touristy since it’s near down town.

Nob Hill: kinda like north beach, but more residential. Lots of yoga studios (dude, there’s a fucking yoga studio on every goddamn block. if you’re into that, welcome to mecca).

Downtown/Financial district: windy! holy crap it’s like tornadoes between buildings. Not very dog friendly at all.

SOMA: sterile modern loft apartment zone. It’s all very new construction but there isn’t much of an actual scene there. People don’t go there to visit. It’s like The Domain or the Dallas of SF.

Ok so areas to avoid living in:
The Marina. Full of jocks/preps/trust fund dickwads with spiky hair and striped shirts. It’s expensive and you’ll want to kill your neighbors.

[Didn't believe me, DID you David? :P]

Pacific Heights. This is the preamble to the Marina. It’s one of the most expensive parts of town. It’s also the steepest. Like, hardcore cyclists walk their bikes through it. Danielle Steel lives there.

South San Francisco. It’s not “the southern side of SF” – it’s an entirely different municipality. And it’s full of thug street kids.

The Tenderloin. That place scares the shit out of me. I walked through it to get to the apple store on market street one sunday afternoon and it was like a fucking zombie movie. But with drug addicts instead of zombies. people shooting up on the sidewalk in broad daylight. Just wandering around the middle of the street. It is the cheapest place to live though.

Hunter’s Point. This is the dark underbelly of SOMA. Lots of gangs and shootings and shit, judging from what I see on the news. I never go down there.

Welcome to San Francisco

This wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive guide, just a few things I’ve learned since moving here from Austin.

Eric, Stephanie and I had Korean BBQ Saturday Night. We talked about meat, and whether or not it’s okay to eat it. As we were eating meat.

We all feel guilty about it. Eric wants to try meat from animals slaughtered in a more humane way. I brought up the time Vance and I cooked lobster, which was a traumatic experience to say the least. They beat on the lid of the pot as it heats up, just so you know. You have to hold it down while they boil to death. It was a meal eaten in awkward, contemplative, guilt-ridden silence.

Another conversation I had recently was at lunch with some coworkers. One was defending (in a purely logical, devil’s-advocate sense) Michael Vick. The rest of us charged at him on our high horses, also while eating hypocritically meaty lunches. He said he had to dismiss any criticism of Michael Vick if it came from people who eat meat.

The cruelty and suffering is hard to justify, regardless of whether it is due to utterly fucking sick subhuman pieces of shit like Michael Vick, or to the out-of-sight yet institutionalized, mechanized disassembly of living creatures that provide so many good, decent people with so much of the food we eat.

The problem is that we don’t want to make other animals suffer, but meat is so good!

There is a solution. But we don’t have the technology to implement it yet. It is years, perhaps decades away.

Synthetic Meat. Meat tissue grown artificially without a nervous system and therefore without a conscience, incapable of experiencing pain and suffering.

There are some challenges synthetic meat has to overcome in order to be a good substitute for the real thing. The texture is one of those problems. In order to get an authentic meat-like texture, the muscle cells must be stretched, broken and re-formed into strands. This requires mechanical manipulation. In nature, the growth and exercise of the animal provides this mechanism. In the laboratory, we’d have to duplicate this process.

Picture this: an artificial, robotic cow skeleton with synthetic meat grafted onto it. Walking and moving like a cow, but without skin or a brain or other organs normally found in a cow. Just the muscle tissue and some fat for flavor. The robotic skeleton stretches and exercises the muscle tissue until it is the texture and consistency of actual cow meat.

You could even have specialized meat robots that only produce certain cuts of beef. Imagine long tubes of filet mignon! Without ever hurting an actual animal!

Here’s the kicker Eric came up with: Because the robotic skeleton is metal, it can conduct heat. The artificial cow could cook itself from the inside out. You grow the “cow” for some period of time, flip the BBQ switch, wait till it’s done cooking, pull the delicious cruelty free BBQ off of it, eat your meal, clean the skeleton off and start all over again with some new meat cells.

Self-Barbecuing Cow!

This is inevitable.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road!

Yesterday Pixie and I went to the Albany Bulb over in the East Bay.

It’s hard to describe. From what I’ve read, it isn’t officially a park per se. It’s actually a landfill for construction debris. Several years ago it turned into a Homeless Suburb of sorts. I saw several semi-permanent structures that appeared to be in active use as primary residences.

So there’s a lot of graffiti and Junk Sculpture, some of it quite large and complex. And tons of people were walking their dogs there. Families exploring the “exhibits” together. I wouldn’t have guessed a landfill could be a tourist attraction but it seems pretty popular.

This anarchic sculpture garden really is one of those “Only in the Bay Area” kind of things.

I recommend visiting this odd gem, especially if you have a dog. I know I’ll be back. Just watch out for the rusty rebar and occasional patch of broken glass.

This album cover got me thinking:

Was the typeface hand-drawn specifically for Chairlift, or did the designer choose it from the zillions of existing typefaces already out there? It’s so articulated, almost greebled, that I doubted it existed as a proper typeface.

Indeed it does exist. It’s called Dazzle Ships, designed by Ray Larabie.

Dazzle Ships is also the name of an album by Orchestral Manoevers in the Dark (OMD)*. That led me to this blog post (Seriously, go read it. The video is great. I love what happens when the two kids rip apart the Genetics textbook). Dazzle Ships was very avant garde, an odd record for OMD to put out at the time. But as Dazzle Ships (the camouflaged WWI vessels, not the album) were designed to throw the observer off, so it seems was OMD’s album.

I love it when bands put that kind of thought into their work. So back to Chairlift. In an interview, totally crushworty frontwoman Caroline Polachek said:

A chairlift is a long slow panoramic trip over changing terrain.

Sigh. Move over, Natalie, I want to have Caroline’s babies now.

So yeah anyways, if you were wondering what font Chairlift used on the “Does You Inspire You” cover, it’s called Dazzle Ships.

*When I was in high school I dated a girl who was really into OMD. They came to Houston on their Sugar Tax tour in 1991, but they played a 21+ club on Westheimer and we were both under 21. She wrote a letter to Andy McCluskey and he personally got us into the show. That was kind of awesome.

I was hanging out with some friends at Dolores park this weekend, and one of our rambling conversations was about which countries have the most sex. My guess was Brazil. No reason really, they just seem to party a lot. Then someone else brought up a related question: how would that ranking relate to overall economic productivity of each country?

Like, if they’re too busy having sex all the time to work, maybe they don’t do so well economically. Or if they’re repressed and don’t get laid enough they aren’t motivated to work.

Still curious a couple of days later, I gathered some data available freely on the web to answer these very important questions.

Data on sexual frequency and satisfaction are from the 2006 Durex Sexual Wellbeing Survey.

Data on 2006 GDP for the same 26 countries is from the World Bank.

Sorry the data is kind of old but at least they’re both from the same year. And my guess of Brazil having the most sex was almost right- they’re #2. Greece is #1.

I combined the data sets manually into a google spreadsheet (the Durex survey data is served up in a flash app, which is, like, totally annoying, so please appreciate my work here :). You can view the combined dataset spreadsheet here. 26 countries are covered.

Without further ado, some charts:

Quality of sex doesn’t seem to correlate.

Quantity doesn’t either.

There appears to be little correlation between frequency and satisfaction too, especially if you take out Japan (the lonely one in the lower left):

Anyways, I’m glad we had this little chat and I hope you learned something you can share with the other kids at the playground.

UPDATE: Chris points out that it makes little sense to compare overall GDP since the population sizes vary so greatly. So here are the same charts, corrected for per-capita GDP:

Still no correlation.

This year was my favorite burn so far. Not coincidentally it was the first time I stayed with a theme camp, Robosapiens. They were an amazing bunch of folks.

I used a hydraulic jackhammer. I helped make at least 100 crepes. I became desensitized to the sight of breasts. I tried magic berries with the camp across the street, Bat Country (that crew would have made Hunter S. Thomson proud :). I rode a giant birthday cake art car. I rode a double-decker bus. I slid down a six story astroturf ramp. I sat in a metal teardrop and experienced a brief moment of silence. I found Waldo. I jumped on glowing colored discs under a full moon. I got used to hugs instead of hand shakes. I did more bike riding that week than I did the rest of the year combined. I danced to techno music. I don’t even like techno music!

I saw and did things I couldn’t explain even if I wanted to.

I lost four or five pounds.

One thing I didn’t do was take a lot of photos. My still camera, it’s third trip to burning man, was jammed with dust. I do have video clips I shot with my Flip cam though!

The weather was pretty mild at night. I slept in a t-shirt. The dust during the day was insane though. Dustiest year for me so far.

On to the videos!

Here’s a shot of Sebastian (violin) and other members of EQLateral playing inside the Robosapiens dome:

More violin!

The Robosapiens robot sculpture in action, touch screen and all:

This year one of the camps brought a double-friggin-decker bus, like they have in England. The Nowhere Omnibus actually ran on time and had several stops around the Esplenade and the open playa. I shot this from the top of the bus while it was parked in front of center camp. You get a taste for how the dust storms interact with the art pieces out there, shrouding and then revealing.

More bus ride. You can see some of the larger pieces on the open playa, such as the Rocket (video of liftoff below).

I don’t think I can explain this. I think it was broadcasting DNA sequences or something.

This ramp was covered in astroturf. I heard from one of the safety inspectors (yeah, who knew BM even had those?) that it was the leading cause of injuries this year. It was basically the Rugburn Express. I rode down it on a trashcan lid, but this guy kept riding is bike down it over and over:

The rocket “launch” was a pretty bad-ass pyrotechnic display. Stick with it through the multi-colored mushroom clouds:

And finally the Man burning:

I didn’t stick around for the Temple burn sunday night so I have no video of that, unfortunately. I did spend a lot of time there while it still existed and it was quite beautiful. I’ve never been anywhere so soaked in emotion. Massive kudos to Adam and the rest of the Temple crew for such an amazing structure.

I had dreadlocks by the end of the week so when I got home I just got a mohawk instead of untangling them.

I feel compelled to keep the absurdity going.

I follow directions. I’d walk out with a different baby in the same
dirty diaper.

Courtesy of buzzfeed:

[Wow, slideshare's embed code is MASSIVE]

I write, then think

I did some reading thanks to some tips from friends and colleagues. In hindsight, my previous post on Health Care and Free Markets is just one more contribution to the noise.

What are blogs for, if not to bloviate? :) Moving on.

Not about Socialized Health Care

I now believe that my assumption that this is going to be a Free Market vs. Socialism debate was false, and regrettable. Nate Silver’s post Not all Socialist Countries are Alike clarified for me the difference between Single Payer and Socialist Health Care. They are not even close to the same thing.

It’s very unlikely that universal socialized medicine would even be proposed let alone enacted in the US. Congress is too scared by Angry Old White People Who Scream* to even suggest it. And structurally, it would be a major upheaval to implement government-run hospitals on the scale necessary to take care of every one. Various Veterans Administration scandals over the past few years don’t help promote the idea either.

Linking Insurance to Employment

The problem of bundling of health insurance with employment was created by a loophole in (federal ?) wage caps during WWII. Conservative and liberal friends of mine both agree about this origin. It started out as a job perk so companies saddled with wage caps could compete for talent, but persisted after the wage caps were lifted. I don’t know why that is, but I’m sure it’s complicated, juicy material for policy geeks. I’ll try to read up on that.

Lighting Candles Instead of Cursing the Darkness

Aaron asked about the existence of a “Credit Union” model for health insurance. Ivan points out some interesting free-market/collective solutions in the form of Captives – a form of insurance gaining popularity with small business and wealthy individuals that works a lot like a credit union. This sounds promising. You pool your financial resources with other individuals into a fund for paying out claims. The money is invested while it’s not being payed out, so you could actually make dividends if claims don’t put a huge dent in it.

My initial impression is to like the idea, but the fact that many Captives are created in the Bahamas and Belize makes me worry that it’s not entirely legit. Shades of Enron. More reading to do on Captives for sure.

Meta

About the spirited healthcare debate itself: Curiously for all the noise, there is currently no bill in congress to debate. The administration has basically recognized that health care is a huge problem and would like to do something about it, but no concrete proposal exist yet. Only speeches.

*All the Death Panelers are either protesting out of complete and utter ignorance of the issue, or (my gut feeling) using the issue as a cover for something much sadder/more sinister: they object to having a black president. Angry old white people want “their” America back, and conservative leadership has latched onto health care as the conduit for their rage. It’s an unfortunate situation if that’s the case, but I can’t think of a simpler explanation for their actions.