Only in San Francisco...

Recently, I saw this on the side of a bus here in San Francisco:


Yes, those are really cartoon penis men. Apparently it's part of a larger public service ad campaign in the city. Although I have not seen this in person, the campaign has taken 3-dimension form too:















You can read all about it at healthypenis.com.

The Fog

Sometimes the fog looks quite dramatic coming over Twin Peaks. This was taken on Saturday from the steps across the street from our apartment.

The Murals of the Mission

I've always admired the great number of murals in the Mission district, and for a while I've wanted to photograph a bunch of them. Today, being a beautiful sunny day in the city, I finally made the time to do just that. Unfortunately, my digital camera is with Stella in North Carolina right now, so I took all these on my iPhone. While I was biking around, the streets of the Mission were full of cars stuffed with Mexicans waving theirs flag, honking and screaming. You see, Mexico had just beat the US in Soccer to win the Gold Cup. My Mexican neighbors were very, very excited.

Here is a but a sampling of some of the murals in neighborhood.

Zen and the Art of Palm Maintenance

I've never thought too much about palm trees until recently. On the five minute walk between the train station and my office I pass roughly 75 palm trees (no, I've never counted them, and I'm not going to). Recently, a crew has been doing maintenance on them. I never realized that palm trees needed to be maintained, particularly with such big machinery.



It makes sense that you should cut off the dead fronds, lest you end up with a tree like this:


But what surprised me was the workers striping the old remains of the fronds off. Here are before and after photos:



I don't see what the purpose of this is, other than to create a more manicured look. Personally, I prefer the "before" look to the "after" look. Anyone else agree, or is this just evidence of my preference for all things scruffy?