Thrilling Stories

Local 23

2006-03-28 14:09:54.109825+00:00

Clothing store (also sells charming, assorted bric-a-brac) that sells vintage pieces as well as . Owned by transplanted Torontonian Jessica Moss, Calgarian Jennifer Glasglow, and Genevieve Heistek (places unknown). I was in there a couple of months back and witnessed a sketchy tall Quebecois guy run off with the cash box after unconvincingly masquerading as an employee and escape on a bicycle he'd stashed on Clark.

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Rescued

2006-03-24 18:23:25.884096+00:00

This is where I got caught out in double overhead hurricane surf with no surfboard, after wiping out and having my leash snap. I would have drowned if I hadn't been eventually rescued as I struggled to stay above water in the middle of hige crashing waves.

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Where a guy in a big truck threw his hamburger at me

2006-03-30 19:36:34.631528+00:00

I was driving peacefully in my car one day until a maniac in a BIG truck cuts off another guy in also a BIG truck (though the other one was slightly BIGGER). And the guy in the less slightly BIG truck must of flipped off the BIGGER truck guy because he threw his hamburger out of the window at him! But consequentially, he missed...not taking into hand Newton's law: force = mass x acceleration or realizing that we was going approx. 50 mph as his burger took flight and scattered wildly in the air and hitting front left-side of my car! I was pissed. "Why the hell did he have to do that?" I asked. He obviously cutted off the guy with the less slightly BIG truck and could of flipped him back or cursed, "Fuck you, assshole!!" or something. But no, he *had* to throw his burger like a lunatic into traffic and hitting me.

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Frank N Hanks

2006-05-07 01:01:06.517166+00:00

DIVE BAR. This is a dive bar in koreatown. Dart board but good luck finding darts that aren't bent all to hell. Once I saw a drunk thrown out on his ear, in the process of being ejected he somehow lost his pants and his sandals. Out on the street he tried to fight an old man that looked like Popeye. James tried to stop the fight by throwing one of the lost sandals at the drunk's head. Popeye took advantage of the distraction and punched the drunk man in the head.

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Bicyclist tried to break into my car and kill me

2006-02-08 02:54:57.300841+00:00

I was at a red light, he rode his bike through traffic going the opposite way. He went through the red light toward me, hit my window on his way by, stopped his bike and proceeded to try to break my window and kick in my door. He was totally psycho. I called the cops, they said it happened all the time around there. They also said they probably wouldn't catch him. I saw him again that night about a mile away going through a crosswalk. I consider it a good sign that I didn't once have an urge to run him over.

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almost drowned in the ocean

2008-05-01 21:45:49.660968+00:00

i was about 12 years old, and i didnt really think much about ocean swimming safety. i grew up in phoenix, so i knew how to swim fairly well, since everyone (well, except me) had a pool. oceans, i found, are very different than swimming in pools. my brother and i had gone out fairly far into the ocean, far beyond the point where we could still touch the ocean floor without having to go underwater. i realized that i was getting too tired to keep swimming, and attempted to swim back to shore. after a while, i realized i was making absolutely no progress. i was, in fact, even further away from the shore than when i started trying to swim back. i was caught in a riptide (although i didnt realize it at the time - i dont think i even knew what a riptide was exactly.) im not sure if this is how drowing in the ocean happens or not, but i went through a few phases of trying to keep afloat. the first was essentially just kicking my feet and staying afloat like normal, just like you would in a pool. after a while, that got extremely tiring, especially after i had just swam so much trying to get to shore. also around this time, i started getting hit by a lot of waves which was making breathing a lot more difficult. i embarked on a new plan: slowly letting myself drift down to the bottom of the ocean floor until i needed air, then swimming up to take a breath of air, keeping my head up as much as i could, trying to time it with wave crashing, and then slowly drifting down again - and repeat. during this last stage i became painfully aware that i was getting into a situation where i could easily drown. i remember being very scared, but also feeling like there was nothing i could do about it as i was completely out of energy. those two feelings kind of counteracted each other. i just kept bobbing. about the same time that i had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that i was going to die, i heard someone yelling. "you are caught in a riptide! swim diagonally! follow me!" a lifeguard had apparently seen me and apparently many others - although i had no idea anyone else was around.. they were mostly all on surfboards, it seemed like. i dont remember if i told him that i could no longer swim, or if he just knew, but he threw me that little orange thing they always carry around. i grabbed it and he started swimming for the shore. i could not believe how this guy could swim - i was making a huge wake as i was being dragged to the shore. when we arrived on shore i was about 3/4 to 1 mile away from where i originally started. the lifeguard asked me where i was from, and told me to be safe. i didnt know what to say - he had literally just saved my life. i said a simple 'thank you'. it was the closest to death i think i've ever been. i have a new respect for the "no lifeguard on duty" signs i used to laugh at. i haven't swam in the ocean since this incident.

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Castlemaine

2006-03-24 22:14:43.272632+00:00

I was jet-lagged as hell, driving my little Toyota on the "wrong" side of the road, sitting on the "wrong" side of the car...and it was a stick. Utterly exhausted, I came around a blind corner, tried to downshift and stalled the car. As I sat in the middle of Castlemaine's town square, engine turning over, a petrol tanker came flying around the corner far above the speed limit, headed right for me. He slammed on his breaks, and just before the truck hit me, I managed to pop it into gear and peel out, squealing tires from both vehicles echoing throughout the village. My second near-death experience in Ireland...my favorite country on Earth.

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train kept a-rolling (almost).

2006-05-03 16:44:10.227282+00:00

after a fiasco involving a gutter punk bridge guide; a misunderstanding about free beer and IDs; a forty year old bouncer named Dawn who wore really hideous jeans and cowboy boots; and an impromptu trip to the burger king drive thru our posse decided to once again watch the train roll past. only this time there was, for some reason, some drunk woman and her car stuck on the train tracks. the train barely stopped, and as we helped push the car off the tracks, an SUV full of coked-up strippers rolled up and started climbing on the train. what?

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Face Off With a Dog

2006-05-13 00:39:30.456469+00:00

1994 - Hiking with fellow students in this area, before it was so built up. We came around a corner and could see a dog alert and start charging us straight down the road. He was still a long way off, so we stopped. I had already got used to carrying a couple of good sized rocks where ever I went. The dogs in Ecuador are quite "thrilling". I waited until the dog was in range and the gods smiled on me that day. My rock hit the road directly in front of the dog, bouncing up into his chest. The dog stopped in his tracks, turned around and ran the other way. We turned around and went back they way we came and then found a nice spot on the river to drink some wine and bask in our victory.

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Preview screening of Gore's Inconvenient Truth

2006-05-26 10:57:34.179575+00:00

100 million people will be displaced world wide if the antarctic ice melting continues, oceanic and wind flow patterns will go into utter chaos, the arctic ice cap will become a hot-tub of exponentially increasing temperatures. The science is indisputable, but the media and general public perception of the facts is being distorted by a complex matrix of memetic and motivational constraints. We had a live satellite feed video chat with Al Gore afterwards, and his semtiment and efforts are working strongly towards the upwelling of massive citizen awareness and apathy smashing education and media to curcumvent the entrenched administrations reluctance to take this seriously. KPCB and the myriad of powerful companies that it funds, have an incredible amount of potential influence around policy change, but also around the public perception of such an important and, now clearly, critical, issue. The role that KPCB is playing in this exposure is very encouraging. Gore makes a strong case at the end that this does not have to be a choice between vitality and profitability, that tremendous opportunity exists in doing the right thing. The challenge here, now, with these companies, is to step back and revolutionize the game.

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Rev Phil Trial

2006-12-12 00:20:57.45976+00:00

This Wednesday, a colorful and well-known character in Portland’s bike scene, will find himself in court facing 2.5 years in jail. Reverend Phil Sano is on trial for an incident that happened during the World Naked Bike Ride on June 10, 2006. Based on eyewitness statements, and reports published in the Portland Tribune and the Oregonian, here’s a brief summary of what transpired.

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1. Lake Merritt BART Station - Indicent Begins

2007-02-06 21:52:05.240641+00:00

A little after 3 p.m., Oakland police learn that a Honda Pilot SUV has been carjacked at the Lake Merritt BART Station.

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2. Telegraph Avenue and MacArthur Blvd - Chase Begins

2007-02-06 21:58:32.948242+00:00

Police begin chasing the suspected vehicle near downtown Oakland. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "the chase streaked from Telegraph Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Way to MacArthur Boulevard." While in pursuit, police say the suspect is driving 70 mph on surface streets sometimes on the wrong side of the road.

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3. Lincoln Avenue/Elementary School - Chase Continues

2007-02-06 22:06:24.919842+00:00

The pursuit continues as the suspect drives southeast on Interstate 580. He exits the freeway in this more residential area of the city and heads north on Lincoln Avenue. The street is busy and parents can be seen lined up along the sidewalk waiting for their children to get out of Sequoia Elementary School and Head-Royce School. According to police, children are walking along the avenue as the suspect drives past.

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4. Mormon Temple - Car Chase Ends

2007-02-08 18:30:16.222769+00:00

The car chase finally ends, across the street from the Mormon Temple in the Oakland hills. Police cruisers hit the vehicle and cause it to spin to a stop, a maneuver known as the Pursuit Intervention Technique, or PIT.

The vehicle spins out but also hits a 1995 Ford Windstar that has pulled over because of approaching law enforcement. A woman is in the driver's seat of the Windstar when the vehicle is hit. She and the suspect are treated by paramedics, but only the suspect is given a neck brace.

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The Riptide (aka Sandbar)

2007-02-08 13:00:51.288199+00:00

by Joe Donohoe I remember the Sandbar because one night I somehow ended up there, very drunk, after an evening of exploratory chaos that somehow brought me almost to the edge of the ocean. The place smelled like beer and puke and the floors were sopping wet with what seemed like the sweat of the patrons. The Sandbar was right “where the debris meets the sea,” at the edge of the city. The Sandbar first materialized in 1941 as the Oar House at 47th and Taraval in the Outer Sunset. Half of the present building was divided off and served as a bait shop for Ocean Beach fishermen, known as The Master Bait Shop. The Oar House acquired a rough reputation. In the 60’s and 70’s it became a biker bar and extremely violent fights were not unknown. One well-told story recalls the loser of a fight retreating into the reasonable sanctuary of the night after being stabbed, and returning again later in the evening with a shotgun to shoot off the arm of the man who’d stabbed him. As the gunman fled, the other patrons took the severed arm and put it on ice in the hope that if they kept it fresh, the good surgeons of UCSF might be able to sew it back on. Unfortunately, this didn’t work. And fortunately everyone was drunk or somebody might have gotten hurt. In 2003, the Sandbar was acquired by Dave Quinby and Les James from the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. Inside, among other things, they found the vents in the men’s bathroom had caved-in. The smell of the sea and years of shit had seeped into the sand below and now hovered in the air, rather than being pumped out into the atmosphere. The drainpipes from the bar had corroded and anything that had ever been poured down the bar sink had collected and fomented in the sandy soil beneath. “You know you got a problem when even your plumber says it smells bad,” said James. Thousands of metric tons of Rose’s Lime Juice will take their toll. Haunted by the thought of the bad karma of decades worth of drunken amputation and other debaucheries, Quinby hired a practitioner of Haitian voodou to come in and exorcise the place with doves and sage. Reborn as the Riptide, the pipes are fixed now. The ambience feels like that of a proper neighborhood bar. The staff is solid and there’s a roaring fire in a stone fireplace to keep out the Pacific chill. The two TVs are always playing surf films and the walls of knotty pine create great acoustics for live music nights (bluegrass and blues feature heavily). The walls bare signed promotional photos of musicians Quinby or James have met (James was the drummer for one of the Bay Area’s premiere country bands: Red Meat) including Johnny Cash and Ralph Stanley. For solid working class ambience and low pretension it’s the best night-spot west of 9th Avenue.

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taxi on fire

2007-02-22 08:59:45.573081+00:00

hive posted a photo:

gnarly smoke everywhere

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Naked Drug Dealing Middle School Principal

2007-03-02 17:12:03.811927+00:00

By Pamela Lehman and Steve Esack Of The Morning Call When police entered the office of Nitschmann Middle School Principal John Acerra to arrest him for allegedly selling crystal methamphetamine, they found the 50-year-old educator naked and watching gay pornography with sex toys nearby, sources say. Police also found a glass drug pipe and $200 in marked money on the desk, just minutes after an informant wearing a wire arranged to buy meth from Acerra about 6 p.m. Tuesday, officials said. read the whole story

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Oregon's infamous exploding whale incident

2006-12-05 17:22:43.147798+00:00

[posted on biohabit]

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Space Bike RV Guy

2007-10-02 22:45:15.298551+00:00