Mission Mission

Last minute gift idea! Our pal Cleveland Motley recently launched his very own bag business, Motley Goods, based right here in the Mission. Everything’s handmade by Cleveland, and the star of the show seems to be the “Weekender”:

Our medium roll-top backpack.

The Weekender, trimmed in leather is a great do-it-all bag.

Designed to be small and refined enough to take to work, yet large enough to be your ticket out of town.

Its heavy-duty waterproof Cordura nylon exterior and separate waterproof vinyl liner combine with leather trim to become a modern design and rugged utilitarian tool.

18″ x 12″ x 6.5″ give the Weekender 23L of internal capacity.

Three large external pockets

Optional 17″ padded laptop sleeve

One 6-inch velcro closed internal pocket

Thick foam back pad

Leather straps, choice of leather or nylon trim

Cordura exterior fabric – available in six colors

Heavy vinyl liner

Secondary Velcro roll top closure

Boom. Our other pal Nattles wore it around for just a couple of days and got hammered with compliments the whole time, presumably because it looks both gorgeous and like serious business. The rolltop on top and a healthy amount of velcro throughout ensure everything stays nice and dry, and the leather straps and trim ensure you look dope.

See the official Weekender page (with more pics of the bag in more colors) here. Or check out the rest of the Motley catalog (which includes a huge backpack, a basket bag, a pannier/backpack, and a satchel) here.

Here it is in action:

Yum, that sandwich was damn good! As usual! And now Pal’s needs our help! Their existing space can’t sustain them any longer, so they’ve started up a Kickstarter campaign to help fund their move to some place better:

Pal’s is moving into its fourth year inside Tony’s market on 24th St making friends with everyone in the surrounding neighborhood and serving all organic locally sourced innovative sandwich and salad creations.

We have been blessed by having the best and most loyal customers a small local shop could have..our goal has always been to use the best local products in our little bread-surrounded creations

Your inspiration, suggestions, interest and recurring support drive us every day to create new and tasty things to help make your lunch day a little brighter and a little tastier.

Now after almost 4 years inside Tony’s market we have outgrown our current location and we need to move to a new location sometime in February or March of next year. so we can take Pal’s to a new creative level.

Visit the Kickstarter page to see how you can help (mostly you pledge money and they pledge to give you sandwiches and t-shirts). And there’s only a couple days left, so hop to it!

Thanks to Saturday’s arctic downpour, the Mission saw far less Santacon participants than is typically the case, with only scattered packs wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood. Those that did make it out were easily separated from their groups, making them much easier to pick off one by one, thus culling the herd.

Grinchcon 2012 wins this round!

KronnerBurger is just the best. I won’t go into anymore detail than that, since the menu doesn’t either, and part of the fun was being surprised by the nuances and details of the preparations of everything. The food was outstanding, the drinks were outstanding, the space is fun, the music was pretty interesting, the service was great. KronnerBurger is the best. (And they’re open tonight and tomorrow, 5pm-2am.)

(Oh and, yeah, it’s not Cronenburger.)

Confidential to Nick Pal: Hurry up and try the Scotcholate Milk, because it should probably be this week’s Drink of the Week.

The Found Footage Festival is a riot. They scour video stores and garage sales all over the country and turn their findings into a tight little incredibly hysterical cinematic presentation each year. And then they take it on tour. Nick and Joe host the screenings, and they’re pretty funny too, so it’s like live comedy and a YouTube K-hole rolled into one.

Here are some highlights new for 2012:

-A mysterious video found in Vancouver last year titled “Hand Made Love”
-A video featuring a woman whose enthusiasm for craft sponging borders on psychotic
-A new collection of exercise tapes, including one called “The Sexy Treadmill Workout”
-Never-before-seen clips from the Kenny “K-Strass” Strasser yo-yo pranks that the FFF hosts pulled on news stations in the Midwest last year
-An “opening act” of found classroom films from the ‘60s and ‘70s, curated especially for the show by renowned collector Skip Elsheimer of A.V. Geeks

And here’s the trailer:

Advance tickets here, or just show up at the Roxie tonight at 8pm.

I’ve always been intrigued by bars and restaurants that get their own private barrel of whiskey. Four roses does these branded bottlings a lot: Nopa used to have one, I think Elixir still does, even Beltramo’s, the South Bay’s most famous liquor mart, had their own branded bottles of Four Roses. For me, though, it’s hard to form an opinion on a spirit with just one shot in the course of a dinner or a night out.

Enter Hog & Rocks, who is offering their private barrel of Elijah Craig 12 by the bottle. Here’s the deal: you pay up front for the bottle, they put your name on it, and they keep it behind the bar. Then, any time you want, you just walk in and have them pour you a shot. I’m especially looking forward to convincing friends to go with me without mentioning the program, and then just walking up to the bar and having them pull out my personal bottle like a boss.

They also allow you to add up to four names in case you don’t think you can go through an entire bottle yourself. But I live a few blocks away, so I’m not worried.

Drink of the week is brought to you by Poachedjobs.com.

Enjoy it while it lasts, because there’s going to be some serious rain coming any minute now!

Also, try to do a better job of parking your sweet ride next time.

Residents have been questioning the design that DPW has proposed for the new park set to blossom at 17th and Folsom since the first draft was revealed, and although many of their concerns have been addressed in subsequent revisions, one of those qualms continues to stand out. Quite literally, actually, in the form of an 8-foot fence surrounding the park:

The original concept design was even more inwardly focused, though it did address access to the future affordable housing to the north. Most egregiously, it set the 8-foot-high fence right at the park’s edge, making the 10-foot-wide sidewalk feel even more constrained…

The inflexible, over programmed design remained inwardly focused and lacked any integration with the urban fabric and immediate neighborhood community, which features many arts organizations. By most measures of good urban design, it was still a very unsuccessful design…

A low fence, such as the one at the nearby Mission Playground, can provide safety for small children without such a defensive and negative feeling.

[Link]

So, do you agree that DPW is totally completely it when it comes to building this park?  And just how high does a park fence have to be in order to keep all the good stuff inside while not looking like a prison from the outside?

Previously:

• Potential New Park On 17th And Folsom
• Breaking: Proposed 17th and Folsom Park Will Be Green
• Future Park at 17th and Folsom Will Probably Take a While

Ex-Mission stand-up comic Chris Garcia has done us proud and popped up on the latest episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. In the stand-up world, that’s basically like getting an interview on Letterman. Big things for this guy, I predict. One day I’ll proudly say, “man, I remember when he was working on that ‘homeless man who only speaks in early 90s song lyrics’ bit at the Dark Room.”

Apparently Chris isn’t only in LA to “make it”. His dad lives down there and has been struggling with Alzheimer’s so he moved to be closer to family. That totally sucks, obviously, but Chris manages to tell us all about it with the typical comic coping mechanism of hilarious jokes.

Here it is. Fast forward to the 30-minute mark for his segment, if you want to skip Andy Dick, who even sober manages to be a trainwreck.

[via WTF]

And here’s his bit on the Mission, because we like to re-watch it every couple of months:

Such a tiny cobblestoned alley, the corner of Pink & Pearl.