Sunset District

Dear, dear friend of ours Natalie Galatzer has been producing and trafficking pies for 2 years via her one-woman company, Bike Basket Pies. But as all good things must end, June is the last month to have cupcake-sized pies delivered via bicycle to your door, dog kennel, dark frightening alley, moving car, or anywhere else a bicycle can go.

Bye, bye, Miss Bike Basket Pie (photo by Andy Smith)

Grinding 50-80 hour weeks for 2 years to run a business by yourself AND work a day job is exhausting. It also deprives you of experiencing first-hand the community you're serving. Natalie is ready to return to saner hours and reconnect with a world which keeps turning as she bakes into the wee hours of morning.

June 29 is the end day to experience a Bike Basket Pie. Try a shaker lemon pie; you may indulge in Meyer lemons foraged from this blogger's own backyard!

Hyper-local lemons

Pie production and trafficking is a jungle. Welcome back, Natalie, to so-called civilization.

Previously on Uptown Almanac

• Bike Basket Pies Gets Even More "Famous"!

Fecal Face recently published this ghastly photo of a Sunset District compost bin with a major poultry problem.  Seems like this might be some sort of health code violation, although listed under the "acceptable green waste materials" section of Recology's website is "Food Scraps (Anything that used to be alive)."  Well, shit, that's one way to word it.

Anyway, I imagine a pack of feral cats is now calling the area around this compost bin home.

I realize the N Judah is quite possibly the most infuriating, crowded, slow, and self-medication demanding form of public transportation in the world, but there is absolutely no excuse for not knowing how to hold an iPhone while shooting video.

To assist us in this simple "How to hold and iPhone while recording video" tutorial, I've enlisted our 4 o'clock hour college dorm-room buddy, SpongeBob:

In the first photo, SpongeBob is hanging out in Dolores Park amongst the endless fields of flowers and skies of butterflies we've come to enjoy on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, SpongeBob has downed a 40 of Olde English and smoked half a bag of grass, so he is shooting video vertically.  SpongeBob should be shot.

In the second photo, SpongeBob is 'shredding mad trail' on his mountain bike.  Of course, he's riding no handed so he can record some sick youtubes of his adventure.  SpongeBob should win an Oscar.

Folks, crackheads will always be crackheads, but we San Franciscans can come together to teach people how to properly hold their iPhones.

Ocean Beach Bulletin was lucky enough to score an early copy of the new book, "San Francisco's Playland at the Beach: The Early Years" by local historian James Smith.  While the history of a lost oceanfront amusement park might not be your thing, the book is packed with 400 photos and illustrations of the park in its glory years.  OBB explains:

Smith’s book shows some of the best-known Playland rides in their earliest incarnations: the Aeroplane Swing; the Dodg-Em bumper cars; construction of the Shoot the Chutes water ride that was the first big attraction to the area (excluding the carousel and perhaps the Pacific Ocean). Check out the 1920s kids waiting in line wearing paperboy caps, ties and knickers. View the extravagant nuttiness and racist iconography of Topsy’s Roost, a dining and dancing venue with slides from elevated “chicken coop” booths to the dance floor below. Topsy, a ragamuffin character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” smiles in pickaninny glory on the restaurant façade. San Francisco was no island of racial sensitivity when it came to selling chicken dinners in the 1920s.

The post goes on the talk about getting beat up for your It's-It money and whiskey being sold in coffee cups.  Sounds like it was my kind of place.

Read on or buy the book.