Not too old for a wardrobe malfunction

While driving past the Star of India this foggy morning, I thought I spied a certain laxness in sail maintenance. This couldn’t be, though, as the dedicated volunteers at the Maritime Museum of San Diego take such good care of the old girl (and besides, she just came out of dry dock). I suspect this is, in fact, her “Halloween costume,” and she is playing the part of a pirate ship.

Turns out she is dressed up for some upcoming Halloween events: lantern-led tours on the evening of Friday 10/30, and on Saturday 10/31, a carnival and costume contest, followed by more lantern-led tours.

Sounds like a good place to take your little pirates. For tickets or more information, please see the Maritime Museum’s events page.

Los Amigos Invisibles are a fantastic band from Venezuela. They play a mélange of funk and disco flavored with Latin rhythms and put on one of the very best live shows I have seen. They’ll be at the House of Blues on Thursday August 6th.

If you miss their show, you might want to pick up one of their albums; their latest is titled Commercial.

As I boarded my train to work this morning, I noticed a little something on all the seats:

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Though it’s lain dormant since February, the next San Diego Tweetup is coming at us like a linebacker–an outside linebacker, to be exact. Expected to attend is San Diego Charger #56 Shawne Merriman, who will share his Twitter experiences in an on-site interview with SD Tweetup organizer Jenn Van Grove. It’s all happening Thursday, June 25 at 7:30PM at Stingaree in the Gaslamp.

There should be record attendance at this event. The first SD Tweetup happened in March 2008 and attracted about 30 people. The last one, held at Wine Cabana in Old Town, had over 200. As of today, more than 300 had RSVP’d at the SD Tweetup page on meetup.com.

If you want to attend, be sure to RSVP at the website above, get there early, and come armed with a Twitter account and a device to tweet from. If you don’t want to fight the crowd, consider tuning in to Jenn’s interview with Merriman on UStream.

Merriman has been giving away VIP seating near the interview. If you’re not afraid to be up close with the big guy, send a tweet with “VIP seating” and the tags #lightsout56 and #sdtweetup in it. Shawne will pick 3 winners a day until the event. More instructions are here. (Full disclosure: I won one of these seats and will be tweeting like mad from it!)

See you there, SDTweetuppers and Charger fans!

Thanks to everyone who blogged, tweeted, and Facebook invited our event!  I wanted to create a central place to showcase everyone’s coverage first starting with this teaser photo of me @richandcreamy and @moniquethegeek !

More after the Jump!

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VS. 

I know it’s been a while since my last post, but I’m back from out of town travel with a broken arm and more posts to write; so here we go! When last we together, dear readers, we looked at how pop-culture fervor intermittently brought down the Comic Con hotel reservation system. This time I’d like to warn against a different threat to your perfect Con experience – Padres Fans…

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Since my last post on homelessness, I’ve been paying close attention to the downtown homeless population.  NPR had a great send up of the changing demographic here in San Diego and across the country.  Even though the winters here in San Diego aren’t too harsh, I’ve been wondering about how these folks continue to sleep out in the cold or rain every night.  Then a few weeks ago I noticed the tents.  At first one or two, but then recently I saw a nice orderly row of pink tents while I was out skating the other night.

You may have seen them yourself, especially if you’ve been around the Central Library or Post Office on G Street after closing or on C Street near the recently defunct Hotel Churchill.  Tents, many of them pink, have been popping up along sidewalks throughout downtown at night.

My question is: where did all the pink tents come from?  Is it a city thing?  A church donation program thing?  Were they surplus from somewhere?  If you know, please drop something in the comments because I haven’t been able to find out.

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22nd Street...bizarrely popular

The block I live on in Golden Hill is popular in the most bizarre way. Though it only has 6 residential buildings, all single-family homes except for one duplex, it has 32 public parking spaces, which are always filled, day and night. Even more bizarre, my side of the street has 20 of those spaces–and only 2 residences.

It gets better.

- My next-door neighbor doesn’t drive and doesn’t own a car. Even if he did, his property has a small parking lot on it. He doesn’t use or need public parking.

- Of the other 4 residences, 3 of them have driveways. They don’t need public parking.

- The one business on our block, a Victorian home converted to office use, has its own parking lot. Oh, and it’s vacant right now.

So who owns all these cars and why are they parking here?

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It’s getting to be that time of year and the San Diego Comic Convention is just around the corner.

This year’s con is July 23-26, and will mark the 40th anniversary of the convention and my 16th year in attendance.  Even before I lived in San Diego, I made the annual pilgrimage to San Diego and it has definitely been one of the things I look most forward to every year.  For me, the Con is a like Holiday observed with great fanfare, celebration, and best shared with friends (and sometimes beer).

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