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San Francisco Sightseeing

Wed., June 21, 2006

I did some stereotypical San Francisco sightseeing today. I hiked up Telegraph Hill to see Coit Tower and a prime view of Alcatraz Island. I browsed the stacks at City Lights, co-founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore and publisher to the beat poets. Fisherman’s Wharf, which I also stopped by, is the Times Square of San Francisco: chain restaurants, dreary hotels, questionable entertainments, beggars, tacky T-shirts and trinkets for sale, and fat people clearly not from the city waddling about. This photo of a seagull in a shitstained landscape, eating what appears to be a bun, just about sums it up for me.

A seagull eating what appears to be a bun.

I salvaged my wharfwalk somewhat with a planned visit to the Musée Mécanique, a collection of antique mechanized penny and nickel amusements, including viewboxes for 3D photos (“See what the belly dancer does on her day off!”), player pianos and orchestrions, photobooths, fortune-tellers and palm-readers, love-testers, mutoscopes and slot machines.

Penny arcade cyclists.

It’s too bad it’s not a true museum but a bunch of stuff some daft old bastard collected and threw into a warehouse on Pier 45. There are very few placards describing who made these Wunderkammern and why, how popular they were, or how they work. Or course, there’s also no admission fee to the Musée, so I can’t complain too much.

One of the two most popular attractions was Knock Out Fighters, a primitive precursor to Rock’em Sock’em Robots. They’re these articulated, marionette-like boxer figurines, made in 1928 by a St. Paul-based scale manufacturer, that are completely mechanical and use no electricity. The arms of each player’s boxer are moved independently by two triggers on the gun handle-style “joystick.” A direct punch to the chin of an opposing boxer pushes in a pin that causes the figure to collapse in defeat. The other crowd-favored game was this mechanical test-your-strength arm-wrestler in a luchador mask, favored by gentlemen wishing to impress their ladies.

A luchador arm-wrestling amusement.

I also enjoyed this amusement park model fashioned mostly from toothpicks.

An amusement park made mostly from toothpicks.

Nearby was an intriguing text-and-photo-based history of the roller coaster and the magic year of 1884, when LaMarcus Adna Thompson, a crafty inventor from Ohio, installed the first, the 600-foot Switchback Railway at Coney Island. It topped out at six miles-per-hour and required passengers to exit their car at the halfway point to switch to another track. But even that couldn’t hinder thrill-seekers who waited up to three hours in line to pay their nickel and take the wild ride. That same year at Coney Island, San Franciscan Philip Hinckle installed the first power-chain operated lift-hill coaster, while in San Francisco, two “continuous oval-track gravity coasters” opened, one at Ocean Beach and another at Mission and Eighth. Here’s the text of an ad from that year promoting the latter coaster:

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
A Sled-Ride Down Hill Without Snow!
GREAT SPORT!
PHYSICIANS RECOMMEND IT. * OPEN DAY AND NIGHT.
The CALIFORNIA GRAVITY RAILROAD CO.
Cor. Eighth and Mission Sts.
ADMISSION FREE. * FIVE CENTS A RIDE.
Bring your family and enjoy yourselves.
Polite Attendants. Electric Lights.

There are newer exhibits in the Musée as well: about a dozen old video games plunked way in the back. I was disappointed that the only inoperable machine was one of my all-time favorites, Tempest (1980), and to read the instructions revived fond memories. This game was easier than Old Maid:

TO PLAY:
Shoot the approaching enemy and enemy charges. Player loses a life when:
* caught by an enemy
* hit by a charge
* skewered by a spike

Wrapping up a fine afternoon on my long walk back to the hotel, I was able to score some Mexican Coke. No, not the Lindsay Lohan kind. Check it out, baby: hecho en Mexico.

A bottle of Mexican Coca-Cola.

If you wonder what my fuss is about, you are no soda connoisseur. Here’s part of an Associated Press article from 2004:

[D]iscriminating shoppers [...] say the cane sugar sweetener used in Mexican Coke has a sweeter, cleaner flavor than the high-fructose corn syrup in the American version. Many are willing to pay $1.10 per 12-ounce bottle for the imports, even with cans of American Coke sitting nearby for 49 cents each.

I’ve since read not all Coke in Mexico is made with sugar, but I trust that mine is because there’s an official label stuck to the oldschool green-tinted glass bottle by the importer with sugar listed as the second ingredient after carbonated water.

If you believe a recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which doesn’t offer any hard data to back up its claim, you can find Mexican Coke “just about everywhere in Latino communities across the United States.” But most of the officially sanctioned product here is found in Texas and Southern California, two of the largest Mexican markets in the country. The rest of the country’s Mexican Coke may be “grey market” stock brought over the border by third-party distributors or retailers. See, the Coca-Cola Co. limits official imports of the stuff because U.S. bottlers don’t get any money from Mexican Coke and that makes the U.S. bottlers sad.

One reason U.S. Coke isn’t made with sugar is that domestic sugar prices are artificially inflated to several times of those anywhere else in the world in order to help poor Florida sugarbeet farmers buy another Olympic-sized swimming pool for their second house.

So drink Mexican Coke and not only is it tastier than “the real thing,” you’re screwing over sugar farmers, the Coca-Cola Co. and its bottlers. Amazing how quickly an American icon can turn renegade. I’m going to lug my bottle back to New York and store it in a cool, dark place. As is done with Dom Perignon, I will save it to drink with a special someone for a special occasion.

Tags: Exhibition, Food News, Job, Photo, Video Games | Comments have been closed.