cats

A Cat's Map of San Francisco Coincidentally Looks Like the Human Map of San Francisco

Cats!  They're fussy and lazy and snobby eaters and arbitrarily hate people and often killed by aloof motorists.  That's to say, they're just like us (but four-legged and more or less annoying, depending on the cat).  And further strengthening this point is Wendy MacNaughton's brilliant new map, San Francisco As Seen By A Cat, As Imagined By A Cat Owner.

Yes, it's a map of how cats interact with our city.  But really, take any Joe Schmoe Mission District human inhabitant, force them to get around on Muni, and this is basically their life.  Food on Valencia, homeless camps in the southeast corner of the neighborhood, loud kids and small dogs in Bernal, and a host of risk and terror anywhere outside the neighborhood.  Plus, Dolores Park is pretty much where everyone goes to reunite their wayward and feral friends.

UPDATE: Wendy just dropped us a note, altering us that this map is apart of her and her partner Caroline's new book, Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation and GPS Technology.  The short of it is their fine cat took a 5 week long vacation in the streets of San Francisco, and through GPS technology, they were able to “stalk” it until their eventual rejoining (or, as Wendy more concisely puts it, “It's all about technology, cats and SF. Yes, seriously.”)

It comes out April 9th, complete with a launch at The Booksmith that night!

[Wendy MacNaughton]

CAT

The Dolores Park footbridge has a new work of fine cat art that I must suggest checking out before it starts raining again.

Beware of the Attack Cat

He didn't strike me as very threatening, but I did lose our staring contest.  Also, having multiple staring contests with a random cat is an riveting way to spend one's Thursday afternoon.

Lazer Cat Mural Succumbs to Hype

Over the Christmas break, MAJOR DRAMA went down surrounding Harding Theater's “Lazer Cat” mural.  In short, SFist found the mural “vandalized” with two rad-looking bull heads painted over the mememural.  The internet promptly shit itself, only to discover that the Lazer Cat mural was intended to be a temporary mural, the first in series of pieces with a month of shelf life.  Out of embarrassment, Gallery Heist, who put together the mural project, took down the mural's canvas and left the abandoned Divisadero theater painted white.

Two days later, the wall is well on its way to being completely tagged over.  Adam Infanticide has a sticker declaring “I [sic] BEAUTIFYING MY COMMUNITY.”   Another from the local favorite gibberish tagger “Beer Picnics” reads, “Vampires Using Extacy”  But most prominently is the giant HYPE! tag, which pretty much summarizes the entire ordeal.  Even if the mural wasn't painted over intentionally, its demise was almost certain due to its subject matter and hype.  After all, you cannot paint a mural like that, in San Francisco, without consciously thinking about how the mural will be played up on Laughing Squid, I Can Haz Cheezeburger and other glorified Tumblrs.  At which point, it becomes difficult to tell if the mural is art, or merely someone looking for their 15 minutes of fame.  Certainly some found it to be art (I skeptically fell on this side), but without a doubt others assumed it was the latter.

I'm only surprised the mural made it as long as it did.

San Francisco's Other Cat Murals

The entire internet now knows about both the rad “Lazer Cat” mural on Divis and the “Invisible Bike” mural downtown, but there are plenty of other cat murals worth checking out:

Balmy at 26th.  I'm not sure why there is an insect dancing in front of the cat or why the cat would want to eat/yawn at said insect or why the cat doesn't have lazer eyes KILLING the insect, but I dig it.

Orange at 24th, from the guys at Telephone and Soup.

Poplar at 26th.  You can also see a larger version of this badboy on flickr.

This last photo was shot by Octoferret.  I remember seeing this in Neillie and 23rd (Noe Valley) a few years ago, but I don't know if it's still there.  We can only hope the artist returns to bomb the rest of the city in response to the latest outbreak of Koi Fish.

What am I missing?

Mural Featuring Giant Cats With Lazer Eyes Going Up on Divis

Andrew over at Aggressive Panhandler has already dubbed the muralA kitten shoots at the San Francisco skyline with lazer eyes or possibly spotlights while another kitten pounces on a multi-colored dragonfly and a third kitten peeks out from below”.  However, based on the number of tall buildings, it looks like they're cats dispatched from San Francisco to take down NYC once and for all.  Who knows.

Get all the details over at AggroPA.

Cool Kid Travels: Arata's Pumpkin Farm

Growing up in New England, it seemed like a significant portion of October was spent carving pumpkins/throwing pumpkins out of moving vehicles at street signs, riding in haunted hayrides, and navigating corn mazes (of course, my eight-year-old self had a shitty memory).  With the lack of foliage and farms located within 4 blocks of my house, I've never really found myself in the fall mood found pretty much everywhere in the eastern half of the country.

After talking about shit to do in the fall in SF, a friend suggested I steal a car and head down Arata's Pumpkin Farm in Half Moon Bay.  While this place has been around since the Depression and likely known to everyone who has spent years in the Bay Area, it was new to me and a bunch of other transplant losers.  So after a night of drinking crappy beer and lackluster pizza, we hauled ass down the coast to what has to be the closest to an authentic New England pumpkin farm I've seen.  A petting zoo!  Sword fights!  A haunted barn! Pumpkins!  A maze!  Statues of King Kong!  Feral cats!  Goats!  Overpriced produce!  Adult-onset diabetes!

Admittedly the maze (not pictured because all my pictures just look like bales of hay) wasn't incredibly hard, half of the attractions were not open until October, and they didn't have kegs of Pabst or indoor bicycle parking, but it was still a quality trip out of the city.

  

  

The petting zoo was full of goats, a cow with a sore of the back of its head, a bunny, and a bunch of bird.

This cat is a real asshole.

I guess they sell pumpkins.

After leaving the pumpkin farm, we stopped off at Moss Beach to look at starfish and seals and shit.  “Walking down to the beach, I briefly step on a wide and flat rock covered in sand.  It was soft and had a bounce to it.  It was a dead seal.” - @tpaz