gang of snails - stuff about san francisco

Gang of Snails will return on Wednesday Thursday.

Death by Caltrain happened for the fourth time in less than a month. What part of STAY OFF THE GODDAMN TRACKS are you people having problems with? [Eye On Blogs]

Some startup that employes 375 people doing… something… now employs only 300 people. Or 325. Hard to say. [Valleywag]

BANG’s sudden about-face on layoffs after union files labor violation complaint. [The Snitch]

Kern County officials stopped performing weddings after the Supreme Court enforced equality. What are they doing now? [City Insider]

The rich really are different: Meet the San Francisco precinct where 85 percent of voters thought Yes on 8 was a good idea. [SFist]

Image: Lucius Kwok

10:30AM: Join The Impact: The National Protest Against Proposition 8 at a city hall or courthouse near you. [details]

With Muni soon to be $37 million in the hole, it’s pretty likely that fares aren’t going to stay at $1.50 for much longer. [SF Examiner]

Dungeness crab season starts on Saturday, early reports say it’s going to be a light haul this year. No bargain crabs for this Thanksgiving! [MenuPages Blog]

Is SoMa’s shuttered Smart & Final set to reincarnate as a somewhat more expensive and hopefully less depressing full-service grocery store? [Curbed SF]

Never get between a geek and his $499 JesusPhone. [Valleywag]

DHL is wrapping up its U.S. domestic operations on January 30, this shuttered office on Sacramento & Davis in San Francisco’s Financial District shows just how fast they’re moving to stop the cash bleed. [DHL]

Join The Impact: The National Protest Against Proposition 8 happens Saturday in a city near you. The San Francisco protest is happening at City Hall, in Oakland at City Hall and in San Jose at City Hall. There are dozens more protests in smaller (or larger) towns in the Bay Area, including Alameda, Bakersfield, Berkeley, Fresno, Modesto, Monterey, Mountain View, Napa, Redding, Salinas, San Rafael, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Stockton and Tracy. Most protests start at 10:30AM, except for Mountain View.

To see all California cities with protests tomorrow, go here.

To see a list of all cities across the nation with protests, go here.

These folks gathered briefly outside the Bank of America on Market & Spear a few minutes ago to call on the institution to stop funding coal and invest in solar power. URL given was http://www.DirtyMoney.org/

Rincon Center doesn’t get good cell phone coverage to begin with so when I pulled out my phone to check the time after lunch, I wasn’t expecting to see much, if any, signal bars. I was not expecting to see the screen directing me to plug in the phone. As I looked up, I saw about four or five other people pulling out iPhones and doing their own wtf faces — all of our phones had been deactivated. As panic was starting to set in (how can I go three minutes without Twittering some inane bullshit?) I rebooted the phone. Still deactivated. Tried it again. Success!

Let me tell you, it was a scary seven minutes. Where were you when the great iPhone outage of lunch, in downtown San Francisco, happened?

Image: ten safe frogs

There might be something that Muni actually can do well: Retaliaion. The City Insider notes that two former Muni employees, a maintenance work and a driver, are suing the city. The maintenance worker says he was singled out for harassment after reporting a driver for skipping a few runs, while the bus driver says he was assigned back to work too early after being involved in an accident that killed someone, along with some further harassment while he did some office work. We knew Muni employees were dedicated to doing something, and now we know what that something is. [City Insider]

Overheard at Rincon Center a few moments ago:

“Have you heard about the wildfires down in Barbara Walters County?”