California’s Ongoing Suicide Attempt

I’ve been meaning to post an omnibus review of all the latest indicators of California’s steady road to becoming Venezuela, which is going into high gear now that we—finally!—have a governor named Gavin (long overdue), but news items have piled up faster than human excrement on a San Francisco street (about which, see below). So just a couple of new highlights.

First, how long until there’s a Road Kill Cafe in San Francisco to serve up an all-new “alternative California cuisine”? Because:

Video of Man With Dead Raccoon in San Francisco McDonald’s Sparks Health Concerns

Chris Brooks went live on Facebook on Sunday morning after he saw a man put a bloody, dead raccoon on a table of a McDonald’s in San Francisco.

Brooks says he was heading to work and about to get breakfast at the McDonald’s on Potrero Avenue and 16th Street when he recorded a now-viral video of a man sitting in front of the raccoon and another man grabbing the carcass from the table, leaving behind a trail of blood, before throwing the animal into a garbage can outside.

Meanwhile, did you know there is now an app for tracking and avoiding human excrement on the streets of San Francisco?

‘SnapCrap’ app invites San Francisco residents to report poop on city streets

The new SnapCrap app is bringing San Francisco’s poop problem into focus. The free app launched Tuesday for iOS users invites people to take photographs of feces on streets and sidewalks that need cleaning and delivers a report to the city’s 311 hotline.

Sean Miller is the brains behind the app and told NBC Bay Area he was inspired to start the project when he moved from Vermont to San Francisco in 2017 and was surprised to find himself constantly stepping over human waste.

San Francisco is known for its filthy streets; the 311 line receives about 65 calls regarding sidewalk poop every day. To address the issue, the Department of Public Works announced in April it hired five staffers to join a “Poop Patrol” to steam clean sidewalks and clean up feces.

Here’s the handy chart CNN—CNN!—reported recently (and yes, CNN seems not to know how to spell major city names, but why start now):

And San Francisco isn’t just trying to cut the crap. They’re also working on reducing public urination, with . . . pee-resistant paint? Here’s a video explainer:

Well, at least one business is thriving and expanding in the Bay Area: Progressive coffee!

Wrecking Ball headed to Berkeley with goals of a fourth wave coffee movement

Roughly five years after opening its first brick-and-mortar on Union Streetin San Francisco, Wrecking Ball Coffee has a second outpost in the works on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. . .

Wrecking Ball came to fruition in the world of third wave coffee roasters, a landscape relatively devoid of diversity, so Cho wants the cafe’s next iteration to represent a “fourth wave.”

What this means is the Wrecking Ball crew plans “to reinvent the neighborhood cafe space by making diversity and inclusion our top priority, instead of just a value,” he said.

How is this accomplished? Well, for Cho, it means figuring out how prioritizing inclusion can shape not only his cafe’s culture but also the shop’s menu. Or, how is inclusion reflected in the staff he hires? Then there are the questions of how his efforts could influence gentrification in the neighborhood?

“These are a few of the many difficult questions that we’re diving into headfirst with our ‘big audacious goal’ being to inspire and pioneer an entirely new category of American business: businesses that reflect, inform, and inspire the diversity of America,” he said.

Now, I’m sure you’re relieved to learn that the acute shortage of progressive coffee venues in Berkeley is finally being addressed! Just what we need: waking up to woke coffee!  But this discussion of diversity seems a bit vague. I have a suggestion: Obviously we need to stop calling coffee “a cup of Joe,” because Joe is such a neoliberal, cis-het, white male supremacist patriarchal name. Can’t believe it is still in use. Such a macroaggression.

Personally, I’m going to hold out for fifth wave coffee.

Get your SnapCrap app today!

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses