During the dotcom boom, October was a month with many pedestrians downtown and heavier than usual traffic on San Francisco streets. We’ve missed that for two years. Now it is back.

I don’t know if it is legal to sell live chickens in the City. One of my Yemeni employees, decades ago, was arrested for butchering a lamb in the basement of his restaurant for a Yemeni party.
Live chickens are regularly sold at the UN Plaza market. Its unique to see the Safeway brown bags squirming with a chicken inside. This is a photo of a live pheasant being sold in the back of the UN Plaza Wednesday market.

Last Saturday evening we went to the Foreign Cinema deep in the heart of the Mission District on one of the bad blocks of Mission. Not the worst block. Foreign Cinema is a great place. Beautiful women in short skirts, the jet set crowd, good food and an outdoor foreign film showing. Table cloths and a big crowd.

David Brooks had a piece in the NYTimes the same day about yuppies going to bad neighborhoods as a way to be macho and make up for their truly trite lives. There is some element of that, but it is not all of what is going on.

We walked around the corner to 22nd and Bartlett and sat at an outdoor cafe to listen to a Celtic group: base, violin and guitar. Bohemian crowd. Across the street a group of fifteen had clipped a sheet to the fence to screen a classic film. They used a DVD player with a high powered new model projector, a cord ran 100 feet to a plug in a nearby house. About 60F out. Wonderful easy-going crowd.