People

Big Dicks Not Limited to the Marina: SF's Full of 'em

— By Jenny Wilson |

via Condomania

According to a recently published study by Condomania.com, San Franciscan men rank 8th in the country in the largest database of penis sizes on the planet.  Condomania.com confirms what us San Franciscans alsways knew: LA has smaller dicks and bigger egos, New Orleans aint called the “Big Easy” for nothin', and D.C. has boosted its penis sized ranking to #2 since Bush left the White House and Obama stepped into office.

Other interesting facts published by Condomania:

  • Top Ranking State by Average Penis Size: New Hampshire
  • Lowest Ranking State by Average Penis Size: Wyoming
  • Top Ranking U.S. City by Average Penis Size: New Orleans
  • Second Highest Ranking City (Just behind N.O.): Washington, D.C.
  • Lowest Ranking City by Average Penis Size: Dallas/Ft. Worth
  • Blue States vs. Red States: Blue States' Average Penis Size is Bigger!

Formerly the largest survey of male penis size in the U.S. was performed by Kinsey researchers way back in 1948, so Condomania's 10x larger updated database finally gives us a more accurate look at the dicks we're dealing with.

[via LAist]

Liz, Andy, and the SFMOMA

— By Jenny Wilson |

National Velvet, Colection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 

As the world mourns the loss of Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful woman in the world, you can head over to the SFMOMA's website to view their interacitve feature of my personal favorite, 1963's National Velvet. Or, you can go and see this Warhol in real life by heading over to the SFMOMA to view the piece currently on display on their second floor.

Meet Yer Local Bike Messengers

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |


Been wondering about who are some of the oldest messengers in the city?  The drunkest?  The new-ish blog dedicated to bikes, skating, and Japanese toys, Deal With It, offers up a short profile of a courier every week:

At 65 years old Roger is one of the oldest messengers on the road. Despite the fact that he dips and smokes dank all day, he is probably more fit than you or I. This old hippie rides 100 miles every Sunday and works full time at King…

Read on…

San Francisco Goes to Austin

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

Geographer playing at the SF Embassy.  Happens to be the only cellphone pic from the house that wasn't taken with Instagram. (pic by aGreatNotion)

Thanks to SXSW, the past week of crowd-free bars and restaurants in San Francisco sure was nice.  Hell, I think this was the first St. Paddy's day in years that Mission bars were not completely nuts.  And while a bunch of our SF neighbors were in Austin running around from show to party to bar to panel, meeting whomever and forming contacts until they passed out in their friend's chair at the Econo Lodge, a 150 or so Mission and SOMA kids grouped together at the SF Embassy.

The Embassy is an outpost for San Franciscans to enjoy San Francisco while being somewhere that isn't San Francisco.  The Ferocious Few, The Frail, Geographer, and Sugar & Gold all performed at The Embassy.  Local companies such as Trumer Pils and Popchips hooked 'em up with sponsorships.  Of course, most everyone there was a San Franciscan.

Wired Magazine caught up with the organizers of the Embassy, whom call themselves “Ambassadors” and are given roles at the space (such as “Minister of Transportation”), to get additional details:

Organizers passed out buttons last year so those affiliated with the SF Embassy could find each other in the giant festival’s crowds. They also enlisted Twitter’s Mark Trammell, who used to make shore-leave guides while in the Navy, to create a field guide relating San Francisco bars to their Austin counterparts. This year, they’ve created passports, pins and shot glasses, and set up each of the 11 rooms in their cluster to represent one of the San Francisco’s neighborhoods.

It was clear from the beginning that a group of that many Bay Area techies couldn’t get together and not create something more than just a crash pad, said Micah Saul, a Google ontologist and the Embassy’s minister of housing, who recruited his Metaweb colleague James Home to help with organizing after being invited by Benveniste, the chief ambassador. […]

It’s also a lot more fun. Talking with the Embassy’s organizers, it begins to feel like they’re a group of professionals planning a summer camp for adults. They talk of turf wars between “neighborhoods” (apartments), making new BFFs, having San Francisco bands play shows that they’ve organized and basically bringing what they love about San Francisco to Austin.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I thought SXSW was all about immersing yourself in the Austin experience rather than broadening the SF bubble?  What about hanging out with people from Austin on their turf? The local bands? The local bars? The local corporate sponsors?  I kid.  But maybe these kids should exercise a little more modesty before anointing themselves the ambassadors of San Francisco.  To quote SF Embassy co-founder Gabriel Benveniste in Wired Magazine, “This is totally fucking self-aggrandizing, but I believe San Francisco is one of the most important cities in the world right now.”

2010 Census Reveals SF's Neighborhoods Becoming More Diverse

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

Reader Brian C. shares his thoughts on the 2010 Bay Area census results:

The results from the Mission's census tracts are pretty interesting.

As we'd probably guess, since the 2000 census, the white population is up in every Mission census tract, and the Hispanic population is down, 15-25% in most census tracts. In the census tract just east of Garfield Square, for example, the white pop. increased by 38% and Hispanic pop. decreased by 26%. One thing that sort of surprised me is that total population is down in most of the Mission despite lots of new buildings and renovations of previously abandoned buildings, which I guess is because of people with children moving out and childless people moving in.

Similar patterns in Bernal Heights, while in neighborhoods a little farther out—Excelsior, Mission Terrace, Balboa Park, Ingleside—the white population decreased and minority populations increased pretty significantly.

One way to interpret this is negative: traditional minority enclaves are being broken up because of gentrification, evictions, rent increases, etc, and minorities are being pushed into less desirable areas. The positive spin would be that segregation is breaking down and in the last ten years we've seen a blurring of the previously stark divisions between white and non-white neighborhoods. So SF has become more diverse in the sense that people are now less likely than before to live somewhere where most of their neighbors are the same ethnicity as they are.

Brian's latter intepretation holds up.  Despite the Latino populations falling in the Mission, they're up by 57% in the Lower Haight, over 50% in multiple tracts in the Marina, and up significantly in the Richmond, Sunset, North Beach, and the TL.  The Asian population exploded in the eastern half of the city over the past 10 years.  However, the African American community fell by 19% in SF (and 25% in Oakland), which Chronicle suggests is because of years of racial equality breaking down community.

And San Francisco as a whole?  The white population actually decreased slightly, with other enthic demographics on the rise.

Previously on Uptown Almanac: 

SF Cool Kids' Next Stop: Artisan Cigarettes?

— By Jenny Wilson |

Lifted from Almost Makes Sense

As we are all fully aware by now, SFgate is pretty much the cutting edge news source for anything big in the hipster community.  That's why unsurprisingly, they are the first ones to announce the next hipster craze: homegrown cigarettes.  From a breaking New York Times story that Brooklyn exsists about homegrown tobacco plants in Brooklyn, the Chronicle predicts that soon, San Francisco's American Spirit hipster smoking population will turn to growing our very own tobacco plants, under the guise of “rebelling against mainstream values.”  

Those whacky hipsters will do anything to be green and cutting edge! Actually, if you read the process that the retired police officer from Brooklyn (read: not a hipster, despite her rad flannel) uses to harvest her tobacco, you'd realize the process is long and tedious, much like dying of lung cancer:

She has to plant virtually microscopic seeds in trays indoors and then, weeks later, transplant them to buckets outside.  She waters the plants daily until they grow to be about five feet tall, with big leaves that droop from the stem.  “Like elephant ears,” Ms. Silk said of the leaves.  “That's why when people joke around and say, 'They're going to think you're growing pot,' I'm like: 'I'm sorry. There's no one mistaking this for pot.”

So, should NIMBYs get worried that giant elephant tobacco leaves are going to start taking over our community gardens?  I doubt it, there's way too much work involved to slowly kill yourself with these.

Previously on Uptown Almanac: 

JORTS: On Demand!

— By Zach Perkins |

HEY KIDS! Guess what you won't be doing this weekend? That's right, going to Dolores Park!  In case you haven't noticed that it's raining outside because you've been hunkered down in your roommate's walk in closet for the last week clawing at the walls and coming down from last weekend's blocaine binge (BRO, THAT SHIT WAS TOTALLY METH'D OUT. NOT COOL.) I'm here to deliver the painful reminder.

On top of that, I'm here to rub in how amazingly glorious the two weekends prior were. In fact it was so nice out that cultural barriers were broken and new levels of Dolores Park fashion were achieved. I present to you, Jorts: ON DEMAND.

Not wanting to waste any material, the excess denim was then distributed and refashioned into headbands.

Denim chokers: the hot item for Spring 2k11?

Incontrovertible Proof that Barack Obama was at Zeitgeist

— By Alan Fineberg |

I heard Barry was eating at flour & water, then got the tip and stopped by Zeitgeist where I was barely able to snap this photo (Secret Service dudes are no joke!). Bartenders were dicks and make a crack about showing his birth certificate. Twitter has the latest on his sensational SF exploits. 

Previously on Uptown Almanac: 

Beth Spotswood on "Suburban Mission"

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

It looks like the Mission has a new microhood, dubbed “Suburban Mission” by culture blogger Beth Spotswood, who got the name from the fact that everything east of SVN is the suburbs of Mission/Valencia Streets.  Over at Curbed, Beth fills us in on the slice of the Mission that's home to big box retail:

Hidden gems in the your neighborhood: Dirty Thieves, the street food festival (is hardly hidden), my morning walk to Precita Park (which is probably, technically Bernal Heights), men playing soccer on the old basketball courts, the apricot oat scone at Atlas Cafe, my neighbor's garage where I vote, and St. Francis Fountain's “the poor man” which is chicken-vegetable soup served over a biscuit. It's $4.50, and cures hunger, sniffles and broken hearts.

Are your neighbors “Rotten Neighbor” worthy? If so, dish. If not… well, why not? I have two kinds of neighbors: Friendly families that have lived on our block for generations, remember my name and make sure I get in okay when I come home late at night. And people for whom the word gentrification (pronounced with disgust) was invented. One of my neighbors drives a Vespa, wears a fedora, worked for (impressive pause) Gavin Newsom, refers to himself as a “foodie”, goes to Burning Man and snidely asks me about my “gossip column” while leaving angry letters for our postal worker taped to the mailbox. Need I go on?

I'm always appreciative of a hot bread tip, but how does being a “foodie” (apricot oat scone expert HELLO), owning a Vespa and wanting upward political mobility make you a terrible person?  Don't get me wrong, fuck people who hate on our mailmen and make snide remarks about blogging, but since when did loathing tech workers living in the Mission become passé?  Did we find ourselves a new pariah and no one filled me in?  And most importantly, does this mean I can start hanging out at The Summit and still have friends?

(link | photo by Bryan Haggerty)

The Everyday Horrors of Minna Street

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

I've developed an unhealthy obsession with reading NIMBY blogs lately.  Not that they are captivating read or anything, but I too will be 40 one day and I'm hoping to get some pointers for how to most effectively waste City Hall's time by having them deal with my petty troubles.

One such blog is Old Dirty Alley, a blog dedicated to a small stretch in SOMA's Minna Street, where every single day is full of shocking monstrosities such as having to call the police on people with their pants around their quads, a completely naked recycler laying in the street with a wine bottle shoved up his ass, pooping on Toyotas, and being forced to scold people for not peeing in a portapottie.  Just awful!

But the photo above shines the brightest.  What could possibly be going on here?  Hemming pants?  Fun with silly string?  ODA has the answer:

weird of the day: a woman getting the bandage on her buttock changed. pants ankle-high. on the street. in public. and not in the most sanitary place in town. said damage was probably caused in the first place by shooting up, or is something meth-related. i did have a moment of guilt where i wasn’t going to put up these photos. but that vanished as soon as i saw the lighter in her hand and realized she was high as hell. i know, i know, gross assumptions. but i’ll bet dollars to donuts …

420 graffiti, a sewing machine, a buttock wound and a poo stain running down the wall all conspired to create this weird of the day.

Weird indeed!  Almost as weird as posting a 23-picture deep slideshow of the occassion.  But I understand, outraged requires evidence.  A single picture can be misleading, but an entire photoset is damning.  If you're swirling that glass of merlot while scribbling an email to your supervisor, you better be sure to have an incriminating shot that will convince them to clean up the bandage-changing epidemic that is choking the life out of our city.

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