Andy Thornley
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apthornley.bsky.social
Andy Thornley
@apthornley.bsky.social
630 followers 2.2K following 110 posts
velocitizen / bullfighter

📍the streets of San Francisco

#OperationalizeEverydayBicycling

#QuestionAutomobileEssentialism

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apthornley.bsky.social
Do read this from @tmsullivan.bsky.social at Digby's Hullabaloo, the @nws.noaa.gov has been de-staffed by Trump and hit nitwit vandals and more heavy weather is heading in
digbysblog.net/2025/09/27/o...
excerpt from Tom Sulivan's post: "When Helene came to visit WNC on this day last year, things didn’t look too bad in this neighborhood until I tried to leave it. Downed trees blocked every road out. The power was out for nine days. Water for 17. And that was for a neighborhood otherwise pretty much unscathed. (It was worse in rural areas and for people on wells.) Internet was unusable for a week. With so much devastation and relief work going on, it was three months before we toured the county to survey the worst. The pharmacist who gave me my Covid booster in July last year died when his four-plex was swept away in the flooding. Our house painter lost his best crew member. His body wasn’t found until sometime in December. While for much of the region things have gotten back to normal, cleanup and recovery continues to this day."
September 27, 2025 at 4:45 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
screen clipping of a paragraph from Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay entitled "Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause" (published in Vanity Fair magazine, Sept 16 2025) – "What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself."
September 20, 2025 at 5:24 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
Anybody need a band name? (spotted at Muni T line Chinatown Station)
Photo of metal door in subway station with the words “UNDERCAR DELUGE SYSTEM” places on it
September 11, 2025 at 10:13 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
Corn Moon over Slow Cabrillo Street
(Richmond District, San Francisco, California, 8:30 pm Sept 8 2025) #GoSloYo
photo of the full moon (the "Corn Moon") in the evening sky looking east down Cabrillo Street with Saint Ignatius Church on Lone Mountain in the distance, 8:30 pm Sept 8 2025
September 9, 2025 at 4:24 AM
apthornley.bsky.social
One further bit of context for this passage: CEQA was signed into law in 1970, if it had been adopted twenty years earlier there might not be a Foster City, and it had never been adopted the Rapid Geary transit project might have been completed in two years
"Foster City persevered. The first full-time resident, San Francisco firefighter Charles Zerbe, settled in 1964. By 1970 the city had 10,000 people, a miraculously fast 11 years after the project was conceived. (Some context: San Francisco recently took 27 years to finish a new bus lane.) That year, residents voted to name their town Foster City."
August 28, 2025 at 5:02 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
August in my mini-meadow – bright yellow coreopsis blooms dominated the meadow a month ago but that show peaked out and black-eyed Susans took over, then spotted bee balm made a move, now I see a second round of coreopsis foliage and perhaps some whorled milkweed poking up, got to love summertime 🌞
Photo of the mini-meadow in our back yard, a 6-foot-square shallow wooden box on short legs, filled with soil and wildflowers and grasses, including black-eyed Susans, lanceleaf coreopsis, spotted bee balm, june grass, and plains oval sedge Photo of the mini-meadow in our back yard, a 6-foot-square shallow wooden box on short legs, filled with soil and wildflowers and grasses, including black-eyed Susans, lanceleaf coreopsis, spotted bee balm, june grass, and plains oval sedge
August 10, 2025 at 1:28 AM
apthornley.bsky.social
Here's a Saturday morning Safeway run with my trusty BOB Yak, after ringing up I pedal home from the Pacific Ocean (bike lane the whole way) climbing about 125 feet over 1.5 miles (sub-athletic San Francisco exertion level), not the only shopping of the week, the rest of it happens by bike as well
Photo of my bicycle with a BOB Yak trailer hitched on, the trailer contains two full grocery bags and a four-pack of facial tissue, pretty standard Saturday supermarket trip (a $158 order in this instance)
July 19, 2025 at 9:08 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
FTFY, @sfchronicle.com
Screen shot of an SF Chronicle headline reading "S.F. residents had parked in their driveways for years. Then someone started snitching", with "in their driveways" and "snitching" crossed out and "across the sidewalk" and "requesting enforcement" superimposed to correct the perspective
July 13, 2025 at 5:01 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
Here's a simple Sunday soul-soother for you, a cluster of Prairie Spiderwort flowers blooming in our backyard mini-meadow in San Francisco
A close-up photo portrait of Prairie Spiderwort flowers blooming in the mini-meadow (six feet square) that I set up in our San Francisco backyard last February
May 12, 2025 at 12:05 AM
apthornley.bsky.social
Prairie Spiderwort makes the scene in the mini-meadow, with Dudley's Rush and maybe Pussytoes (we'll have to see what flowers) joining Lanceleaf Coreopsis and Spotted Bee Balm, spring is here #PrairieMoon
A close-up photo portrait of a Prairie Spiderwort flower blooming in the mini-meadow (six feet square) that I set up in our San Francisco backyard last February A photo of the various wildflowers and grasses growing in the mini-meadow (six feet square) that I set up in our San Francisco backyard last February
April 19, 2025 at 7:57 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
Season 2 of my backyard mini-meadow introduces some new characters, Lanceleaf Coreopsis has asserted itself boldly and is starting to flower, and I see some other new varieties of wildflowers and grasses making the scene, hooray! #PrairieMoon
A photo of the various wildflowers and grasses growing in the mini-meadow (six feet square) that I set up in our San Francisco backyard last February A close-up photo portrait of a Lanceleaf Coreopsis flower blooming in the mini-meadow (six feet square) that I set up in our San Francisco backyard last February A close-up photo portrait of a Lanceleaf Coreopsis flower blooming in the mini-meadow (six feet square) that I set up in our San Francisco backyard last February
April 7, 2025 at 1:25 AM
apthornley.bsky.social
Delighted to see @sfpublicworks.bsky.social crew (staff & volunteers?) out yesterday doing some spring tidy-up on the lush 23rd Ave - Anza St circle, thanks, team!
A photo of San Francisco Public Works staff and volunteers at work on the 23rd Ave and Anza Street traffic circle, weeding and pruning and generally tidying up the green island for spring A photo of San Francisco Public Works staff and volunteers at work on the 23rd Ave and Anza Street traffic circle, weeding and pruning and generally tidying up the green island for spring A photo of San Francisco Public Works staff and volunteers at work on the 23rd Ave and Anza Street traffic circle, weeding and pruning and generally tidying up the green island for spring
April 6, 2025 at 6:11 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
Among the most tragic of the Fox-addled suckers who voted Trump into office a second time are the Latin American immigrants I know who expected him to punish "those bad immigrants" – friend, he meant "immigrants" when he said "immigrants", hope you kept a receipt
screen clip of Adrian Bott's classic Oct 2015 tweet: 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
February 3, 2025 at 4:10 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
Congrats to The Brutalist for its pile of Golden Globe trophies, just remember Don Novello was doing his Lazlo Toth schtick back in the '70s (a low-key hilarious & long-running prank letter project, eventually collated into two volumes)
a photograph of the cover of The Lazlo Letters (1977), a compilation of prank correspondence carried out by Don Novello under the pen name "Lazlo Toth"
January 7, 2025 at 1:05 AM
apthornley.bsky.social
Happy Merry! Joyous Peace!
A photograph of a small gingerbread man (a decorated cookie) held up between my thumb and forefinger, with a Christmas tree decorated with lights and snowball ornaments seen in the background
December 26, 2024 at 1:58 AM
apthornley.bsky.social
Thinking of my dad, and other folks' dads and moms and sisters and brothers and uncles and friends who served our country, with respect and gratitude and love (17-yr-old Cpl Kenny Thornley is the guy on the left, seen here in Korea)
young Corporal Ken Thornley in Korea, circa 1950
November 11, 2024 at 4:34 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
And there's a Lane Street in the Bayview, evidently the SFMTA Style Guide calls for omission of "ST" or other secondary name element ("AVE" or "LN" or "DR" or "BLVD" etc) on the sign when the name is one of those elements, hmm
Street sign on a utility pole at the corner of Lane St and Oakdale Ave in San Francisco's Bayview DIstrict
November 10, 2024 at 5:42 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
San Francisco has a Lois Lane in Little Hollywood, intersects with Hester Ave at one end and Bayshore Blvd at the other, it's a single-sign character so "LN" (I'm sure there was room for the whole "LANE" but the SFMTA Style Guide is strict)
November 10, 2024 at 5:32 PM
apthornley.bsky.social
This would be a good time to re-read (or just read) Ivan Illich's classic 𝐸𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐸𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑦, mind the critical threshold
bit.ly/2mvuwDC
Mrs. Louis Fitzgerald riding a bicycle on Ocean Ave during a San Francisco streetcar strike in 1946, courtesy of the @SFPublicLibrary SF Historical Photograph Collection http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1030326
October 25, 2024 at 2:15 AM