Mission Mission

As many of us have suspected, the oddly-shaped Clooney’s generates its own space-time bubble. Fortunately we have managed to capture it in GIF format.

If you are not thoroughly confused on what you are seeing, you should be. Black and white = 1938 Clooney’s, color = 2012 Clooney’s. On different intersections.

Around 1951, the weirdly angled apartments atop Clooney’s were jacked up on a truck and moved to 25th & Valencia from 30th & San Jose Ave. The SFPL happens to have a picture of proto-Clooney’s from 1927.

Here’s another GIF that shows how San Jose Ave doubled in size westward — the southbound lanes ate the eastern side of the block.

Much more on the Cloonification of Valencia & 25th over on Burrito Justice, including the history of O’Reilly’s, the bar that predated Clooney’s back to the late 1800′s.

You know BART is serious about you not taking the 24th St escalator when they pull out the giant orange cone.

That being said, all sorts of crap other than, well, crap falls into the escalators.

Behold the results of the SF hoodie survey!

Based on the 500+ people who responded, it looks like San Franciscans (at least those who read blogs) own approximately 4 hoodies per person (though there’s a long tail of many SFians more than 10.) The Outerlands lay claim to hoodie per capita, seemingly out of thermal necessity. Using Nate Silver precision, we can extrapolate and jump to the conclusion there are over 3 million hoodies in San Francisco, making it the predominate life form in our city.

Of course, this poll was heavily weighted towards the Mission.

More over at Burrito Justice, including an interactive map.

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Esteemed Mission writer @brittneyg asks an extremely important question about San Francisco:

An illuminating Twitter discussion followed — more here — and thanks to @therealWBTC, we are collecting DATA – how many hoodies do you own?

Do hoodies outnumber San Franciscans? Add your zip code and we can answer that eternal question — who has more hoodies, the Mission or Outer Sunset? And how many dogs have hoodies?

The natural gas fracking facility at Valencia & 23rd should be online by the end of the month.

Koch Industries promises flaring will not start before 7 AM on weekdays, 8 on weekends.

Sirron Norris brings us these curious digits over the Mission:

Is this a new song (perhaps a follow-up to Jenny)? Or is it the next SF police chief’s salary? Maybe Craigslist’s new Missed Connections format?

None of the above – it’s π!

An artistic presentation of sky calligraphy, called Pi in the Sky, the world’s largest ephemeral art installation, will occur on Wednesday, September 12, 2012 between 11:45am and 1:30pm PT (weather permitting). At 10,000 feet above the skies of the San Francisco Bay Area, five synchronized skywriting planes will draw the first 1000 digits of the infinite sequence of pi (π) – the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The event is a community-building civic art experience, yet it also underscores the importance of math and science in our lives.

Now I’m hungry, and Pi Bar doesn’t open until 3:14, dammit.

Good news! The 24th St BART escalator is working!

Here we see the escalator in its new spin cycle. This is a new feature added by BART engineers to clear the escalator of HUMAN WASTE.

Via SFGate:

When work crews pulled open a broken BART escalator at San Francisco’s Civic Center Station last month, they found so much human excrement in its works they had to call a hazardous-materials team.

While the sheer volume of human waste was surprising, its presence was not. Once the stations close, the bottom of BART station stairwells in downtown San Francisco are often a prime location for homeless people to camp for the night or find a private place to relieve themselves.

All those biological excretions can gum up the wheels and gears of BART’s escalators, shutting them down for long periods of extended repairs, increasing station cleaning costs and creating an unpleasant aroma for morning commuters.

Thus far, BART has blamed this on:

1) the main drive gear

2) an overly-sensitive sensor

3) shit.

We should have a contest to guess what’s next on BART’s checklist. I’m guessing:

4) Birds!

Canada!

Reader @doogiehowsahthinks the timing is suspect:

Wow, it’s such an interesting coincidence that as the story of BART neglecting Mission stations started to gain traction, this story suddenly comes out, blaming dirty poor people for the problem.

We clearly need to wrap the escalator and all BART passengers in vinyl.

On the other hand, here’s a trippy panorama of the 24th St BART foyer:

24th St BART Escalator Update:

No escalating. But a new sign!

Hey, wait, July’s almost August. Aaahh, I see, this memo is actually from May.

Anyway, I’m guessing we’ve passed the point of a “minor” repair? I say we just skip this escalation and implement Futurama-style pneumatic tubes. Though if this continues, the flux could build up to such a level that some passengers might enter a vortex and find themselves back in an alternate 1960s where we had BART hovercraft.

UPDATE: Mission Loc@l reports that there’s an oversensitive sensor to blame:

The escalator is back in service most of the time but there is a sensor that stops the escalator if a certain weight is exceeded. Technicians have made some adjustments to make the device less sensitive. Hopefully, that will work and will keep the escalator in service.

Vic Wong summarizes this for us:

24th St BART escalator update: still broken.

The estimated repair date is now IN THE PAST.

Also, if BART ever hits 88 miles per hour, you might end up at the Smile Awhile Tavern.

Again?

Dear BART: it’s not like society just invented escalators. This is a fairly well-understood technology, used world-wide.

How many dedicated escalator repair personnel do you have? How many spare parts do you hold onsite? Why does this escalator keep breaking?

As a completely unfair comparison, I present you the much bigger (and very deep) Moscow subway. Not only are the stations prettier, but they keep the escalators running:

How do you keep them running?

“People,” Likhachev says. His division has a staff of 3,000. It has workers posted at every station during operating hours. It has a 20-member emergency rapid response team. It also has its own factory churning out spare parts, “so we don’t have to rely on suppliers.”

This is not to say that all escalators work all the time, because they don’t. But let’s be clear about one thing: “We do not have escalators out of order,” Likhachev says. “We close some for repair.”