National Geographic Traveler magazine recently asked me to name my favorite Golden Gate Park destination. I chose the playground at Koret Children’s Quarter. Pick up the December issue of National Geographic Traveler to see what other Bay Area folks have to say about the park: San Francisco Symphony Orchestra Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, artist Maya [...]
My twentieth high school reunion is coming up–class of 88, Murphy High School, Mobile, Alabama–and as I was browsing the reunion site yesterday I came across a familiar name, Margaret Brown. She was a year behind me in school, and now she’s all grown up, and it turns out she’s been busy. Months ago, I [...]
It’s a scorcher today. Really. Best place to beat the heat is out in the avenues, where there’s a nice breeze to take the edge off. And if you’re one of those San Francisco people who tends to forget that our city has a coastline that stretches for miles along the Pacific, it might be [...]
Author and editor Jordan Rosenfeld (Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time) pays tribute to San Francisco’s “literary hot spots” in this article for Writer’s Digest. Jordan mentions the historic Caffe Trieste (this is the place that local writer Junvenal Acosta, among others, sometimes refers to as his office), the [...]
Green Apple Books is practically giving away books, people. Actually, the ongoing Warehouse Clearance Sale is coming to an end. All used books are now $2.98 or less. That’s a dollar less than a gallon of gas. A more on-point comparison: $2.98 is just a few cents over half of the five dollar penalty for [...]
I just saw Michael Gondry’s new movie, Be Kind Rewind, on opening night at the Balboa in San Francisco. Mick LeSalle for The Chronicle got it all wrong. It’s a mess of a movie, sure, but a wonderful mess of a movie, a tribute to movie-making, a nod to some of the wacky greats of [...]
On Friday, the day after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in Pakistan, my husband and I saw Charlie Wilson’s War at the Balboa. The movie was okay, perhaps a bit too slick, but entertaining. The moment that was most interesting was when a collective “what?!” went up from the small audience about 15 minutes into the film, [...]
This from CNN today, in reference to allegations that Tatiana–the Siberan tiger who escaped her enclosure–may have been taunted prior to the attack:
A source close to the investigation said the rock found in the habitat measured 9 inches, and a tree branch and pine cones were found that came from trees that were not [...]
Interesting coverage of the San Francisco Zoo disaster over at Big Cat Rescue. The Big Cat Rescue site begins with this article from Newsweek. Scroll down after that–interesting stuff. The Newsweek article speculates that the zoo’s new changes to the tiger exhibit, combined with human error (possibly because it was closing time on Christmas day), [...]
The person who was killed on Christmas Day by a Siberian tiger named Tatiana at the San Francisco Zoo was an as-yet unidentified 17-year-old boy from San Jose. Tatiana was killed by police while mauling one of the victims in the Terrace Cafe, which is located 300 yards from the tiger enclosures. The Terrace Cafe [...]
