BODILY FUNCTIONS

Tecate Brings Back the Pro-Public Urination Billboard

Back in June, Tecate posted a cute billboard on 14th and Valencia that seemed to encourage people to publically urinate on the 299 Valencia condo development.  Some people weren't so happy about this, so Tecate pulled the billboard and issued an apology:

Hi all, this is Felix Palau, VP of Marketing for the Tecate Brand.

We have an internal process whereby every ad is reviewed for compliance with our local code for responsible commercial communication. As a part of that process, this ad concept was rejected by our US team but unfortunately, an error was made and the ad was mistakenly released and posted. We sincerely thank consumers for bringing this to our attention and have immediately removed the ad. We regret the error and are taking a look at our internal controls to ensure this does not happen again.

Thank you!

I guess their internal controls are busted, because the billboard is back in the same spot.

Pay N' Save Doesn't Really "Get" Marketing N' Shit

I've long admired Fayes Video's sidewalk sandwich board.  Full of whimsical drawings, life advice, deals, and the occasional poop joke, it never fails to brighten me up and get me in the Dolores Park mindset every time I walk past.  But just down the street is the Pay N' Save on the corner of 18th and Guerrero, who's board is always weird and strange.

Now, we here at Uptown Almanac don't want to pretend we're above pee humor—we're clearly not.  But a when a corner store owner is advertising his son's blossoming into boyhood—and calling him a freak for it—it makes us want to look elsewhere for Four Loko.

Also, who misspells weiner?  Or wiener.  I mean, seriously.

Mission Street Finally Learns How to Piss Itself

I couldn't believe it: just hours ago, I was standing outside of Taqueria Cancun getting dancing tips from some wobbly crackheads when all the sudden water started bubbling up out of the concrete.  It sputtered and stank, as if it had been guzzling Pabst and Royal Gate Vodka all night and pissed itself in a moment of pure fuckititude.

Anyway, further proof that our government is full of communists trying to take our jobs.

Human Feces Blamed For BART Escalator Clogging

In news that'll make you never want to ride BART again, the Chronicle reveals the reason why the BART station escalators don't work for shit:

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.

As you might have guessed, there isn't much BART or SFPD can do.  With limited public restrooms for the homeless to access, especially at night, the BART escalators provide one of the few safe places to poo.  And SFPD can only cite someone for letting loose if they witness the act itself—something that they rarely do (and probably don't want to, either).

Save some investment in shit-resistant escalators, this is BART's reality to deal with.

Have a lovely commute home!

[SF Gate]

BREAKING: "16th Street BART Smells Like Urinal"

Awwww shit.

According to the newshounds at the SF Chronicle, 16th and Mission smells like a urinal:

The B in BART doesn't stand for “bathroom,” but it smells like it could at the 16th Street Mission Station.

Commuters wrinkle their noses as they walk across either of the two street-level plazas at 16th and Mission streets, where loiterers have few qualms about using the plazas as an open-air restroom, neighbors and officials say.

“The elevator becomes an easy-access urinal or worse,” said Tony Sustak, a Richmond resident who commutes to the station daily. “The real dregs take a dump in public. They're not discouraged by the crowds passing by.”

…The plazas are power washed nightly, but the washers are often forced to wash around a group of several dozen people who sleep on the plaza, Allison said.

BART retrofitted and redesigned the plazas in 2003 and 2006 to make them more aesthetically pleasing. The hope was the community would take ownership of the plazas and crime would drop. But, after a brief honeymoon period of cleanliness, the old crowd and habits came back, BART board member Tom Radulovich said.

Sustak called the plaza improvements “a waste of money.”

“They just spent $4 million to make a fancier urinal,” he said.

Shocking!

[SFgate]

With Tecate, The World is Your Baño

I've been seeing these billboards around the Mission for a few weeks now, with one notably placed along Valencia Street—the venerable public urination ground zero of the well-watered Mission District.  And it would therefore be quite easy to get mad at Tecate, with all their encouraging of young drunk guns to unkink their hoses and allow their sprinklers to go tooka-tooka-tooka-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic in one of many dark alleys in the neighborhood.

But then I bother to Google Translate the latter half of the ad—It's easy to be a man of character.  Is this… irony?  Tecate, are you seriously trolling us right now?

I, for one, will not be patronized.  Either you cut it out with the wisecracks, or I'm just going to keep on drinking Tecate.

[Photo by The Tens]

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