B2B Update: Valiant populist rhetoric fails to alter path of evil corporate no-fun machine, while nice churchgoing folk flip proverbial bird at everyone.
City supervisors will next week vote on a resolution urging international insurance giant ING to please, pretty please, not make the annual Bay to Breakers 12K/drunken orgy un-fun.
What will ING do about it? Not a damn thing – it’s too late to make any changes to the route or the race structure, but ING will think about it for next year. That is, if there is a next year.
Here’s the real news section: the race WILL have the additional benefit of anywhere from 150 to 200 extra portapotties (providing they are not set afire prior to the starting gun), though we don’t yet know where.
Beyond that, nothing else is new: No kegs. No bottled beer (cans, and presumably boxed wine, are all fine). No shopping carts. Floats must begin at the beginning, and the post-party race is at the polo field, not at Speedway Meadow, Crazy Horse or in complete stranger’s garage.
Naked people = whatever, but please consider hitting the gym before shedding your shorts. Oh – and won’t you please register for the race? Pretty please? Especially you, Facebookers.
The race’s 900 pound gorilla is still comfortably seated in the room, and appears to have signed a long-term lease: there is simply no way to fully enforce the race’s rules, whatever those rules turn out to be.
Mirkarimi related an anecdote from last year: while walking through the carnage in the Panhandle, he saw a group of 10 or so racers pissing on – rather than in – a bank of Portapotties, in full view of a San Francisco police officer. When Mirkarimi asked the cop why he wasn’t doing something about it, the cop shrugged and replied, “Well, what CAN we do about it?” Good point. There’s not enough buses in the Muni fleet to drag all the ne’er race wells off to jail, and once you detain one public pisser, there’s literally thousands more to police.
Though we did find something out on Monday afternoon. We used to think that when it came to B2B, there was only one stance or the other to take: you were either a serial public pisser jealously guarding your right to party, or you were a mean, old NIMBY wishing to water your lawn with something other than recently-recycled Pabst Blue Ribbon on a Sunday in May.
There is, in fact, at least one more way to look at it all: courtesy of Rev. Amos Brown, head of the local NAACP and a former supervisor, we discovered the “fuck you all, I have to go to church” faction.
“People can’t get to church [on race day],” said Brown, who estimated there are as many as 70 places of worship along the race route (we wonder if those will get mapped, as well). “All this is done at the expense of others.”
To those kindly churchgoing folk, no solution or alternative was proffered. For our part, we hope very dearly no desperately-thirsty racer remembers some church services offer wine.
