[photos of the flier-ripper]

hi, Max! The fliering wackos are stepping up… Literally!

When Corey was doing our garden yesterday, he heard our nextdoor neighbor [a history professor (her specialty is German female criminals of the dark ages] Kathy whistling down her driveway, and making the sounds of getting her bike ... Corey had a strong feeling that she was heading out to tear down our fliers ... he went down the driveway and peeked out of a crack in the gate to see her go by ... she went striding by with a huge tree pruner, heading toward Gilman! When she had gone by, Corey went back to the BH for our camera, and told Alexi what was happening ... he ran back and peeked around the corner of the apartments ... there she was on Gilman, tearing down all of our fliers! Corey took long distance pics of her doing it ... they didn't come out all too good, but you could definitely see what she was doing ... He got about 4 shots of her at different poles, and made sure that she didn't see him doing it. The photos are below.

Also last night my guys did a fliering run in San Francisco. Here is their report:

We had a little system: as soon as we reached a pole, Alexi would set his coffee on top of Corey's, Corey would hold the flier to the pole, and Alexi would tape it on, then grab his coffee back, and Corey would slip a handout in the side! Multiple hands! But almost as soon as we started fliering, we ran into a DPW guy in his yellow outfit ... we had seen crews on 24th St. cleaning up the streets ... never had seen them there before. He saw us put up the flier, and told us that he was going to have to take it right down because they were instructed to remove every flier they saw, because it was "vandalism and graffiti". You could tell that he didn't feel good about doing it, but he had to do it, it was what he was instructed to do, and he wanted to let us know ... at one point he said that he often wanted to be able to tell the people putting up the fliers in person that it may be that they didn't get the amount of people they were expecting to their event because he and others on his crew took down all their fliers ... We explained to him that the DPW website outlines the legal ways in which you can flier San Francisco, that there is a whole set of instructions as to what is acceptable, and that we follow it to the letter, and we detailed some of the guidelines, showing him the stamped post date, etc.. It is legal, according to SF city codes, as long as it falls within these guidelines, and that we have run into this situation before with other DPW workers. He had no idea ... He said his supervisor just tells him that they should rip down any and every flier, because it is "vandalism and graffiti". He would get into trouble if they came back later and found that they had left fliers up! He thanked us for telling him ... but he still had to do his job ... We asked him when they finished with 24th? He said 8. Well, we were able to get them all up on 24th, because we covered all the ground that they had already scoured, and then by 8, we were heading toward the end of the street where they had just finished, and they were all gone by the time we completed the area. So perhaps we would get one day of fliers up there! It was interesting that DPW was now showing up on 24th ... because we were noticing more and more young white yuppie types there ... moving into the mostly latino area ... We wondered about calling the DPW office and asking them about this conflict between the city codes for posting fliers and what the DPW workers do on the streets? We felt like the fliering in SF went well ... sometimes you just got a good feeling that the fliers would be up for at least a little while ... especially seeing other fliers that were still up for Friday night events!