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The goodie bag from hell at the SF Zoo
Seriously?
We got these "Old Maid" cards as part of the party favor package provided by the San Francisco Zoo -- a package that included stickers, a pencil, a pad of paper and some other animal-themed ... stuff.
Now, I admit that the zoo birthday party sounds appealing. You provide the money, and the zoo provides the rest -- everything from pizza to cake to party favors. You basically show up and they throw you a party. Awesome.
My only problem is the "Old Maid" party favor. We've talked before about the evils of the goodie bag, but this one truly takes the cake.
If the zoo is going to lock parents into a special birthday package and not permit them to hand out their own favors, the least the place could do is make sure the toy giveaways aren't racist throwbacks from a sad era. Did no one at the zoo even look at this game? Or if they did look, did they simply not care? Read More »
| June 22 2010 at 10:42 AM
My secret parenting fear: goats
I can muster up the courage to scrape a spider off the wall and walk it all the way to the front door, shooing it out of the house. I'm not opposed to killing them; it's just that I hate enormous flies more than I hate spiders, so I figure why not let those eight-legged creatures do me a favor? I don't kill you -- you kill other things. It's a win-win for all of us. Except the flies. Who suck.
Plotting a coup or thinking about rainbows? Hard to tell.
Although terrified of heights, confined spaces and bananas, I can climb the tallest playground slide or squirm through a playground tunnel. I can even peel a banana and hand it over to my daughter, although I hold my breath the whole time and quickly wash my hands and change my clothes immediately afterward. In other words, I can be extraordinarily brave sometimes.
But I will never -- not in a million years; ever -- be able to feed a petting zoo goat or sheep without screaming and shaking and running with fear.
My daughter says, "Hey, let's go to the zoo!" and my body involuntarily trembles. A low moan escapes my lips, and is that sweat beading on my forehead? Probably.
"Oh," I'll answer, feeling her out, "And what do you want to do at the zoo?"
"Feed the goats of course!"
And I'll gently lay a hand on her shoulder and try to let her down easy, knowing full well the San Francisco Zoo is probably the only institution on the planet that is open every day of the year. As if to taunt me. Personally.
But I'll still tell her, "I think it's closed today." Read More »
| March 15 2010 at 06:06 AM
Merry-go-topless: nude figure on zoo carousel
Look for my cover story this Sunday in the Chronicle pink section about classic local carousels. The Bay Area is a merry-go-round destination region (who knew?) with six carousels from the early 20th Century that are operational and open to the public. I had a good time taking my 4-year-old on the road and riding each of them, including four of the carousels in one day -- driving from San Francisco to Santa Cruz to Los Gatos.
Is it a little bit cold in here?
My most unexpected discovery by far was the half-naked woman on the saddle of a lion at the San Francisco Zoo's Eugene Friend Carousel. Among the many artistic details on these old carousels, I had seen several female human faces carved on the backs of other animals. But this figure shows considerably more skin. It's like riding tandem on a lion with Halle Berry from "Swordfish."
This is usually where the parenting blogger manufactures some outrage, but I love the fact that generations of San Francisco children will see their first naked woman other than mom on a merry-go-round. In a less progressive community, the morality police would have painted a bikini on her several decades ago.
A few other observations:
1. I had no idea people in the early 1920s were this cool. Where else did they carve naked topless people. Their mailboxes? Their cars?
Read More »| July 10 2009 at 02:02 PM
Oakland: The little zoo that could
Imagine if Paris Hilton had a younger less hot sister who didn't attract negative attention to herself, and instead studied hard, quietly volunteered at a local soup kitchen and didn't let her animals run loose and bite unsuspecting people. Wouldn't you want to give her a big hug?
Paul Chinn/Chronicle
Yet another baby giraffe ...
That's how I feel every time I go to the Oakland Zoo. While we debate whether to make the San Francisco Zoo an animal sanctuary, bemoan the outdated exhibits and read about the latest chapter in the escaped tiger scandal (I won't even mention the penguins with chlamydia, although that one does fit a little better with the Paris Hilton analogy), it's easy to miss the fact that the Oakland Zoo has quietly been improving over the past few years.
When we became members three years ago, we were already happy with the zoo. It's less polished and much smaller than its San Francisco counterpart, but the exhibits are more wide-open. My biggest complaint is the tendency for animals to go into hiding, which is the best kind of problem for a zoo to have. (We all could use some alone time once in a while, why should we expect any different from our lemurs?)
Here are a few more reasons why we think the Oakland Zoo deserves more credit...
Read More »| September 10 2008 at 11:12 AM
Deja Poop: Best and worst zoo enclosures
This rant was my first post on The Poop, published on July 5, 2006. It was all downhill from here. It's worth noting that the camels at Oakland Zoo have been moved to a bigger enclosure, and the Chinese giant salamanders are presumably in a better place at the new Academy of Sciences. But the polar bears at San Francisco Zoo are still in their sucky enclosure, just like they were when I was a kid. Sad.
Peter Hartlaub/Chronicle
I hate my life.
Don't take what follows as some kind of hippie set-all-the-animals-free argument. The zoo rules. Put one on every street corner. Do you think for a second that if the Meerkats were the dominant species on Earth, they'd be cutting us any slack?
That being said, it's time someone asks: What did the polar bears do to get on the bad side of the people who run the San Francisco Zoo?
It's not bad enough that these cold weather animals have to live at a zoo in sunny California. While animals in newer exhibits such as the lemurs and the black swans get palacial zoo estates to roam around, the polar bears are incarcerated in the ugly stone equivilent of a $625/month studio apartment in the Tenderloin.
The size of the two enclosures for the three bears is pretty disgraceful, but I particularly hate the way some patronizing zoo employee brushed blue and white paint over the stones on the edge of their sad little water pool. Like after 5 or 10 or 20 years living in the same space, the bears are going to mistake their ugly-ass bathtub for a glacier. How would zoo director Manuel Mollinedo like it if someone put him in a cell, and painted a fake plasma television, recliner and cooler full of beer on the wall? Read More »
| August 27 2008 at 03:12 PM
Are you going back to the zoo?
As of this writing, the police are calling the fatal tiger mauling of a zoo patron on Christmas Day a "crime scene," which means the story may change drastically in the next few hours and days. (It also means that there's a 96.5 percent chance that this story will end up as a "Law & Order" plot.) Still, due to the simple fact that a tiger did escape when people were around, I'm sure many parents have already decided whether they're ever going to set foot in the San Francisco Zoo again.
Kurt Rogers/Chronicle
Maybe we should go to the park instead ...
I'm one of those Marlin-from-"Finding Nemo" parents who constantly imagines this type of nightmare scenario. While walking through the Oakland Zoo in the past with my 2 1/2-year-old son, I've often thought about what I'd do if a crocodile or tiger or chimpanzee somehow escaped. (Shove my son in a covered trash can or dumpster is usually my No. 1 imaginary response. Throwing him over a nearby fence is No. 2. All scenarios end with me getting mauled and slowly bleeding to death while writing "I Love You" to my wife on the pavement in my own blood.)
That being said, my feelings about going to the zoo post-Tiger mauling are similar to my feelings about air travel in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the logical part of my brain said it was probably the safest time to get on a plane. The zoo personnel are going to be so paranoid about more bad publicity, that I have to imagine we're all going to get personal tranquilizer dart-carrying chaperones once the place opens again. Read More »
| December 26 2007 at 02:31 PM
The Lion House re-opens ... is that a good thing?
As Pat Yollin reports in today's Chronicle, the San Francisco Zoo lion house re-opens to the public today, after a Thursday demonstration to the media of new apparently safer feeding procedures.
Lionking.org
Are you not entertained?
We wrote a histrionic supposed-to-be-funny post about the feedings (with gratuitously gory photos) in July 2006. A few months later, a keeper was mauled by a tiger in front of a large crowd, and the Lion House public feedings were shuttered -- many thought for good.
I'm shocked that they would re-open the feeding to the public, especially with a pending $8 million legal claim against the city from the woman who was attacked. But it's mostly a good kind of shocked. While watching little kids getting sucked into the gladiator-like mob mentality can be stomach-turning, these feedings are a nice lesson in reality for naive zoo-goers who think all animals are hand-fed handfuls of alfalfa pellets. (And, quite frankly, it's good free entertainment.)
This makes three times in the last several months that San Francisco officials have showed some cajones: 1. The Ocean Beach fires are back; and 2. The designers of the new Koret Children's Quarter somehow bypassed the fun police and refurbished the giant concrete slide -- while building several giant climbing structures. Now if only someone would lift the ban on fireworks ...
What are your feelings about the Lion House feedings? Are you happy they're back, is it too soon or should they be closed to the public permanently?
| September 07 2007 at 06:08 AM
A close call at Grizzly Gulch
I think the moon was directed at the polar bear.
Emmeline had never seen a grizzly bear up close. For that matter, neither had I. And so when the bear approached us, we just stood there -- staring, unblinking, in awe. A flicker of sunlight reflected off a claw. No one moved. It was a momentary, silent connection between man, child and raw nature -- because suddenly the bear stood up. It lurched toward us. It raised its paws and was quickly upon us, swiping furiously.
Even though there was a thick pane of bullet-proof glass between us and the young bear, I still felt like a Shirley Jackson character, closing my eyes and waiting for the inevitable -- as opposed to doing something more useful like putting Emme between the bear and myself.
Of course, the bear wasn't after us at all. It was after peanut butter. And while I took a moment to catch my breath, Emme couldn't have been happier.
Like the kids around her, she shrieked with joy and clapped her hands. "Buh buh buh!" she screamed and pointed.
The new $3.7 million grizzly bear exhibit at the San Francisco Zoo is indeed a hit.
Read More »| July 13 2007 at 06:12 AM
Let's Go to the Zoo! Grizzly bears on MySpace
When we read today's Chronicle story about the new grizzly bear enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo, the last line jumped out.
Kachina and Kiona like long walks on the beach, people who don't lie and mauling drunk patrons who fall in their enclosure.
Sure it's great that the bears are getting a bigger home (they were never on our worst enclosure list to begin with), including a 20,000 gallon pool and heated rocks, thanks in large part to a donation from the fine people at the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.
Now skip to the bottom of the story. Kachina and Kiona have a MySpace page?
While the bears' MySpace blog is unfortunately just a series of press releases (we prefer the let's-pretend-the-animal-is-writing-the-blog method of zoo animal journalism) and the photos aren't particularly provocative (it's hard to make a bear look slutty), there are some interesting inclusions that should provide enough political baggage to preclude either bear from running for political office.
Let's take a look: Read More »
| May 03 2007 at 06:05 PM
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