[ed note: this week, I'm back visiting my old haunts in San Francisco] Whenever I’m back visiting, it strikes me that one way to think about the Mission is: if there’s a platonic ideal of the Person Who Lives In the Mission, that person is 28. Most everyone I see who’s younger than 28 has [...]

Programming note: this week, I’ll be flying to back to San Francisco for 10 days. The ostensible purpose is to close down my money-sucking storage space, but I’ll also be enjoying some well-needed R & R in the Mission (and a perhaps a bit of the old orientalism.) I’m not sure whether this will mean [...]

In addition to the Belmont pit stop described below, we also made it up and down the east coast during our just-completed month of traveling, making stops in upstate New York, Vermont, Vieques (small island off of Puerto Rico) and New York City. One of the perks of sampling so many disparate places is all [...]

This is my publicly-accessible business registry information as retrieved from the web site of the Czech Statistical Office. The line I’ve highlighted in yellow shows my previous address in U.S. Everything’s okay through street, street number, city… until you get to ‘Spojené státy mexické,’ which is ‘United States of Mexico’. ¿ Um… que ? That’s [...]

A rejected directional sketch I did for our client who’s selling burritos in Prague: For such an indispensable and delicious foodstuff, the burrito sure is a difficult thing to make look good. It often winds up looking like an amorphous blob when illustrated and downright repulsive when photographed. There’s a real need in this project, [...]

Inspired by JohnnyO’s sleuthing into Sutro Tower’s missing antenna, I figured I would interrupt normal programming around here (which, let’s face it, has started to resemble an inane cabaret lately, what with children wearing bacon suits and animals giving each other piggy-backs) to do a post on communist Prague’s answer to the Sutro Tower – [...]

One thing I miss living in Prague is the design lectures I used to go to routinely in San Francisco. Two highlights: 1. Victor Moscoso Moscoso was one of the main designers behind the Haight Ashbury psychedelic poster movement. He designed classic hippie-era band posters like this one: He also revealed himself to be the [...]

With the recent talk of martial law in Tehran, my thoughts have been wandering back to the 1909 San Francisco earthquake and its insane aftermath, when the city’s mayor issued a blanket proclamation warning that any and all looters found in the streets would be shot dead on the spot. And, apparently, over 500 civilians [...]

I’ve added Mission Mission to the blog roll, and was pleased to see that they covered the jarring Taqueria Dolores in one of their posts. It’s a ‘Mission-style’ taqueria in Berlin (in Alexanderplatz, no less- a really sterile, touristy square) with maps of the Mission on the walls and bottles of Anchor Steam to be had. [...]

In 1970, a SF activist newspaper published a story anticipating the dystopian impact that the soon-to-be-build BART system would have on the Mission District. In classic trying-predicting-the-future fashion, some of the predictions are spot-on and others are a bit… not so spot-on: Is Senor Taco the type of urban renewal we want? BART will bring [...]