Results tagged “criticalmass”

              

Friday's Critical Mass was particularly colorful this month in celebration of Halloween. We saw the group go by outside A.C.T before the start of Mamet's November, and the theater crowd was into it.

       

Nudity and cycling clashed at yesterday's monthly Critical Mass. Plug1 of What I'm Seeing snapped these choice images, some of them drastically NSFW. (Warning: nudity)

We here at SFist HQ always want to know your thoughts on the marquee issues facing our fair city. And today, seeing as it is another last Friday and therefore another occasion for everyone's favorite bicycle parade Critical Mass, we thought we'd do a poll. How do you really feel about the whole institution? Is it a fun spectacle that you welcome like every full moon, or is it simply a pain in the ass of everyone who isn't participating? Back in May our commenting community went nuts over the issue of charging Critical Mass organizers for a permit, so let's see how you guys feel given the three options below.

     

What in God's name is this all about, select participant(s) who engaged in fire play during Friday's end-of-month ride, but by no means represent Critical Mass or the tireless work that they do as a whole?

CBS 5 reporter Joe Vazquez, who took to the streets with critical massers last month, posed a question: Why isn't critical mass paying its fair share for the cost of their monthly ride? After all, according to Vazquez, an event permit would be $1,000 (that's $12,000 for the year), required portable bathrooms (?!) are another $500 each time ($6,000 for the year), a $1,000 cleaning deposit ($12,000 a year), police protection at 20 officers comes to more than $112,000 a year, and another $13,000 for two sergeants. This makes a grand total of $155,060 tax dollars.

Just a friendly reminder that our monthly bike orgy, Critical Mass, will take place at around 6 p.m.. Ish. It starts at Justin Herman Plaza, but you can pretty much just start riding from anywhere. Spirit of the cause, etc. Anyway, you've been warned.

Just a reminder that today is Critical Mass, wherein bike riders pedal up Market Street. And other places. Seeing as how it's an unseasonably warm day today, it's bound to be crowded so please use extra precaution, drivers and riders. Remember, the right-of-way pecking order is as follows: kittens, old ladies in wheelchairs, pedestrians, cyclists, joggers, and then automobile drivers. Have fun. The action starts at 6 p.m. at Justin Herman Plaza, Market at Embarcadero.

In cyberspace, "trolling" is when someone posts a deliberately controversial comment, not because they really wanted to say it but because they wanted to provoke an angry, emotional response from strangers -- kind of the online equivalent of insulting someone's girlfriend in a bar, or heckling a comedian, or snapping your towel at someone in the locker room.

We had a little San Francisco Polyphony of our own on our way to the SF Symphony concert yesterday night to see Gyorgy Ligeti's shimmerily-dissonant orchestral piece of the same name -- the driver of our MUNI bus finally got fed up with people sneaking in through the back door, stopped the bus smack dab on Mission Street, and announced that the cops were coming to bust all the fare jumpers when we got to Van Ness. Alas, we got to Davies Symphony Hall before we could see if he'd made good on the threat.

Over the weekend we went to Casanova's and realized that hipster beards have achieved some sort of critical mass. It appeared that every fourth person in the bar had some sort of beard, giving the bar a high HBQ (Hipster Beard Quotient, a stat derived by dividing the number of beards per customer, multiplying it by the size of the crowd, and then dividing it again by the square footage). The HBQ was not quite Boogaloos high but high nevertheless. We also noticed that there were also a high variety of beards seen, meaning that the beard craze has gone from it's "classic" phase to "gothic" phase.

There are two events of interest to Muni this weekend: Critical Mass tonight at 6, and Supercross Saturday at one of the baseball parks. Both events are dedicated to the elimination of automobiles, but only one will actually accomplish its goal, while the other will just be a noisy, irritating echo chamber.

Everyone's behaving a little bit funny this weekend, and it's throwing the city's transit into a tizzy. An absolute tizzy! We haven't been this tizzied in MONTHS.

So, the horrible ordeal of Halloween has passed us by, and we escaped more or less unmolested except for Kenny the fire-juggling clown; but SOME PEOPLE just will not let it drop.

Critcal Mass Halloween photos

It’s a classic example of fixie bike lust: the carefully accented color coordination, expensive but mismatched wheels, improbably narrow handlebars, and, of course, lack of any unsightly “extras” such as gears and brakes. But wait...is that a basket we see?

Critical Mass bike ride turns 15 years old today

Wired Magazine has an interesting feature piece on what we believe to be one of those "only in San Francisco" kinda businesses: a mechanic who not only specializes in hybrids, but attempts to run a green garage.

And now for another big city's mildly retarded view of San Francisco:

On Saturday, the roads of west Marin and southern Sonoma counties were rife with those two-wheel vermin known as cyclists. Nearly 2500 of them. No, Critical Mass didn't make a drunken wrong turn on Friday night. This was an impressive gathering of the tribes known as the Marin Century.

Oh lord, what's to be done with these people? It's every week with the loud speakers in Dolores Park, blasting devotional music and testimony and dogma and so forth. You can hear them from blocks away.

Huge thanks to Dapper Dan J for sending along his pix of tonight's Zombie/Bike mob! Dan reports a smaller CM crowd than usual, maybe due to the weather:

going to be a pillow fight at exactly the same time and place?

Can no force stand up to power of Critical Mass? Willie Brown was no match for the monster .. but Willie didn't have a WALKING HORDE OF UNDEAD. Preliminary reports from local Zomboligists predict some sort of catyclismic corpse animation coming this Friday, the 25th, around 6pm. And by terrible, horrible, coincidence, that's exactly the same time that an army of revenge-seeking bicyclists will take the the city's streets. Epic battle is inevitable.

Our friends to the south have come under some uncomfortable scrutiny lately for all the toxic junk they dump into landfills. Greenpeace in particular has been pretty critical of Apple's use of mercury and poisonous fire retardants -- substances from which other computer companies have been moving away. Well, good news, greenies: Apple is oh so gradually cleaning up its act.

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us.

Whether you love Critical Mass or hate it, the folks on the other side of the debate must seem totally baffling, if not downright evil. Its detractors wonder, "how can anyone support an event with no organizers, no pre-determined route, no agenda, and in which everyone has a different reason for participating?" Its advocates wonder, "in a transit first city, how can anyone oppose a method of transportation that's cleaner, safer, less wasteful, and spurs better urban planning?"

Photos from San Francisco's Critical Mass, April 2007

We hope we've worked you into a frenzy with all these free passes to SF Int'l Film Fest movies this weekend! Here's our last set -- after this, you're on your own to catch all the fantastic films they're screening from now until May 10. (Don't forget to check back at SFist for our reviews of the movies too.)