Photo Diary: Dilated Peoples
Photo by Troy Holden.
We’re taking things easy this morning because we’ve got something up our sleeves in a few hours. See you tonight at Muni Time Capsule Happy Hours!
N-Judah *doesn’t* hit a Bentley (but it did!)
An accident happened on Muni rider Greg’s commute this morning. Here’s his account — details and colors from Greg. Please feel free to sound off in the comments section about how you would tell the story. Greg’s morning started like this:
So there I am, rocking out to some music trying to avoid eye contact with the one homeless person on Muni who always manages to sit across from me and talk loudly to himself, when I realized that the train has stopped in the middle of an intersection with a left-hand turn (not unusual) and the doors are open and people are pouring out (unusual). Immediately my spidey-sense is activated. I whip out my trusty camera phone to catalog the action that is sure to come. Outside, it appears that our train and a Bentley had an unfortunate meeting of metal.
A quick investigation revealed the source of the problem: The Bentley driver (from all appearances, a rich housewife possibly borrowing her husband’s car) had stopped at the red light and had gone much too far over the line, blocking the entire crosswalk. This of course put her car in the path of the train as it made its left-hand turn, and consequently the train had slightly impacted her car. Of course, more investigation and possible eavesdropping was the only course of action! UCSF police was on the scene almost instantly, and the blond woman driver (No, I’m NOT making social commentary, just saying how it was!) was trying to tell the cop that the train had turned to hit her car. I’m not joking. This woman was trying to say that the train had turned deliberately into her car. Never mind the giant rails in the ground that clearly determine the path of the train in advance, she was insistently trying to scream accusations at the Muni driver. The UCSF PD officer didn’t even know what to say!
A fantastic comute to work ensued on a different line (6-Parnassus, dirtiest bus I have ridden in a while!) and I was in a wonderful mood by the time I got downtown.
Photos by Greg
Just added: Food Carts at Wednesday Happy Hour with Muni Diaries
Photo by Gary Soup
Look, it’s happiness on a bamboo skewer! And we get to chow down on this tomorrow!
That’s because we’ve secured three great San Francisco food carts that will bless us with their delicious wares tomorrow. Sataysfied, Casey’s Pizza, and Nosh This will be on hand to help sop up the booze you drink as you loosen up to tell Muni stories. Or, you know, just to feed you dinner.
Details:
Happy Hours with Muni Diaries and I Live Here:SF
Wednesday, Nov. 17, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
SOMArts: 934 Brannan Street (cross street is 8th Street)
Take Muni there: 12, 19, 27, 47.
Bring your neighbors! Bring your friends! Bring that old guy you see around the hood who told you about riding Muni back in th 1960s!
Look Who’s Got Hero Complex on the 14
You may know Isaac Fitzgerald as the managing editor of The Rumpus, but what you may not know is that he’s got a little hero complex, which got him into a … situation on the 14-Mission. He told the story at Muni Diaries Live a few weeks ago at the Make-Out Room, and we invite you to enjoy his tale in this video.
Cable Car Operator Stabbed in Chinatown (update)
Photo by wilhelmja
Update (9:19 a.m. Monday): SF Weekly reports that the cable car operator is “fighting for his life.”
Original post: A cable car operator was stabbed this afternoon. Police have arrested a total of four suspects.
SF Appeal has details, via Bay City News.
A Note About Our Sponsored Posts
Starting next week, you’ll see certain posts on Muni Diaries, such as our Fashion Friday posts, that are marked with this little “Sponsored Post” red icon: 
These posts are supported by our local sponsors, such as Secession Art and Design and Mobile Spinach. In the 2.5 years that we have been running Muni Diaries, you haven’t seen any advertisements, but we’re starting to experiment with sponsored posts and possibly some advertisements on the sidebar of our site in the near future.
Having ads and sponsored posts might be standard fare for most of the sites that you read. But because Muni Diaries is built on your stories and our common love for our city, we thought it is only appropriate that we invite your opinion:
What do you think of advertisements on Muni Diaries, and what is your threshold on seeing ads on the site?
Earlier this year, I talked to some journalism students at San Francisco State University about how we started Muni Diaries. One of the first questions from the students was this: “Who is your staff, and where does the money come from?” This was funny to us because the short answer was that there was no money that came from anywhere…yet.
Muni Diaries is run by two humble people from our living rooms when we get home from our 9-5. Our website is generously hosted by Laughing Squid, and graphic and site design donated thus far by Suzanne Lagasa and Yen Pai. But we would like to pay our designers, hire a part time web administrator, and invest in other site features that make Muni Diaries a welcome place to share your transit stories. And we’d like to enlist local sponsors to help us with expenses as small as printing event programs and as large as hiring a website designer and beyond.
With sponsored posts and advertisements, we intend to bring you the same level of fun, entertaining content that you’ve seen on Muni Diaries so far, keeping all our content relevant to you and life on Muni. So if you’ve got something to say — whether it’s about sponsored posts, the business of online media, or our favorite: that hilarious thing that happened to you on the bus today — tell us in the comments or email us any time.