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A tale of two races
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GUR 3rd place winners and my personal tyrants
San Francisco (and I) survived another terrifying Bay to Breakers. If you believe the mayor’s office, Gavin Newsom’s regulations regarding floats and alcohol resulted in less garbage and less drinking:
"The new rules against drinking definitely made an impact - we didn't have to pick up all those beer bottles," said Christine Falvey, spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works.
Since I was there, I’ll just say that I noticed a similar amount of garbage, and a final total of zero sober people. There were, however, a lot of naked old guys in varying states of ‘alertness.’ And really, if you are going to allow nudity, the alcohol will follow no matter what. I imagine (and sincerely hope) that it takes a bit of liquid courage to don a racing outfit that consists solely of footwear; I do know that it takes a drink or two just to feel comfortable marching alongside an outfit like that.
Given the atmosphere of revelry and - let's face it - blatant drunken stupidity, I think the police did an admirable job, in that there were no confirmed arrests (one suspected, but still unconfirmed), and there were only six people detained and later released for public intoxication.
The other race this weekend was San Francisco’s local Great Urban Race, where teams of two contestants follow a series of clues around San Francisco in a city-wide scavenger hunt, using only public transportation and human locomotion. When my girlfriend told me she and her friend were entered in the race I was excited for her – it sounded fun.
However, the clues are obscure, and so each team employs a ‘phone-a-friend’ whose job involves sitting at home in front of a computer actually figuring out the clues and mapping routes to those clues on nextmuni.com, all the while being yelled at over a semi-reliable cell phone signal that somehow translates the urgency in any voice into pure, unadulterated anger. This was my job.
So I sat there on the phone for a few hours trying to make out what in the world I was being ordered to do or look up:
Me: Can you spell it? I can’t hear you very well…
Her: P as in Ploy
Me: Did you say B as in Boy?
Her: NO! P as in Ploy as in Please
Me: B as in Boy as in B’s? What are you saying?
Her: You’re an idiot!
Me: You hired me!
After a few hours the girls completed the course, having almost given up near the end due to what seemed like an impossibility of making it back to the finish line using the approved methods of transportation. When they finally arrived, they discovered that they had placed third out of around five hundred teams. I received a phone call laced with gratitude, compliments and an apology ‘if things got a bit tense there at all.’ I’m glad it worked out, because I have a feeling that if my sleuthing and computer work hadn’t resulted in any kind of victory they would have shown up at my door with a baseball bat and some thumbscrews.
I also found out that the prize for third place is free entry into the national competition in New Orleans. Which means that I’ve got another Saturday in the near future filled with warbled verbal abuse and passive-aggressive cell phone conversations about spelling. Doomed by my own puzzle-solving prowess, I can’t say no when she asks me for help with that kind of stuff any more than I can when she orders me to write an article about it.
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