I sold my black knight a few years back.
The guy who bought it played it non stop for weeks, then it died.
The only repair shop in our area no longer services pinballs at all, so just to have it inspected he's going to have to go all the way to Portland or the Bay Area, 3-400 miles. It's been sitting dead in his living room ever since. It sucks. I hope there's a resurgence and they start working on them up here again.

My freaking ears!

Noise was definitely a factor in wanting to leave the bay area, but far from the main reason.
Where I live now, it's often so quiet I can hear the ocean from about 9 miles away.

Ordinarily, I'm willing to give bad parking the benefit of the doubt. I've been in a scenario where I've been forced to park badly because the car next to me was across the line, which forces the car next to me to do the same and so on and so on.

But in this case, that's not even possible because she's parked beside the trolley(trundler in American?) bay.

If you live in the California Bay Area, here's a little secret:

Half-way between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay is the little town of Pescadaro. Hidden in the gas station there, across the street from Duarte's Tavern, is a tiny Mexican food place. Like a counter and two tables.

Order the carne asada tacos. They're the best tacos in northern cali.

For over 20 years....yep. and before that, I had a grower friend in Willits that supplied me well in the bay area.... but 35+ years of excessive experience taught me absolutely nothing about its effects.....yep.

Organo -mercury compounds are extremely dangerous even at quite low levels because they do bio-accumulate in the natural environment. Read up on Minamata Disease - caused by industrial disposal of organo-mercury compounds into surface waters that ended up in Minamata Bay in Japan. The mercury bioaccumulated into the fish and shellfish - not only neurological effects but also severe birth defects for the population that consumed the fish.

I don't recall buying it myself, but was defiantly the first record i ever owned. My mom however had bought me a Bay City Rollers (i had no idea who they were) cassette years earlier.

(edit) now im on a tangent
The first albums i actually bought myself were Don't Look Back (Boston), Van Halen, and Best of Earth Wind and Fire. All three for under twenty bucks which i had received on my birthday.

However, Bay Area Metro (Caltrans) has no problem with alcohol consumption. Just sayin'

The amazing and exotic birds is one of the fondest memories from my visit to OZ in 2001. We were at the Ballina Beach Resort for the Byron Bay Bluesfest and the buggers would just fly onto your shoulder. Loved it! [Plus I'm a "day" person down under]

I'd have to watch it again and write it down. I can only watch Michael Bay anything once per year.

If Comey was fired after the investigation was over, then nobody would have been upset. It is the timing that upsets people, and should upset those on the right too who want to put the Russian thing behind them.

There is clear evidence that Russia interfered with the election. Now does that mean, Trump, or people closely connected to him and his campaign, were directly involved? No. And most liberals would be okay if that was the end result of an independent investigation, so long as we found the means and methods of the interference and were able to learn actions to prevent further interference with future elections from any outside nation. However, the Republicans refuse to take the investigation into Russian interference seriously. The House investigation led by a guy who was on Trump's transition team, the Senate investigation seems more concerned about who leaked info about Trump than the fact a foreign threat to the security of the United States interfered with the election. They worry about leaks in a White House that looks at top secret information in a very public place, but the actions of a hostile state doesn't seem to concern them like it should.

Now we got Comey, who Trump and his people praised up and down during the campaign and soon after election, being fired right after he says he's going to devote more resources to the Russian investigation. We got a President who broke clear ethical rules (though perhaps no laws) in asking if he was under investigation, in a call which may have been about if he'd keep Comey on. Even the hint of Clinton being involved in even a far less serious offence made the right shout "lock her up", but for Trump the reaction seems to be "he's the greatest President ever, let me suck the chrome off his cock".

He, and the Republicans keep trying to distract the American people from the Russia investigation, which let's remind everyone, is mostly about the interference, and only possibly about his administration's complacency. It is more about the actions of a hostile state than him. It's almost as if they know the Russians interfered, and don't care because they won. If Democrats had won, thanks to the actions of an outside state, especially one as hostile to the US as the Russians, and there was even less proof that Clinton or her team may have been involved, the size of the committee and the depth of the investigation would be many times bigger than it is now. The outrage on the right would be larger than the outrage on the left as it stands now.

And, then right after the firing, Trump goes the extra step of letting only Russian official state media in on the meetings between him and Russian officials. He won't release visitor logs to the White House. He won't release visitor logs to the far more accessible Mar-a-logo, where he looks at top secret documents in the wide open. (Side note, he's cost the American tax payers about a 1/4 of what Obama's vacations cost in 8 years, in just 100 days, and all those people who bitched about Obama vacations, including Trump who complained about how much Obama played golf, are perfectly fine with what Trump has cost the American tax payers in his vacations.) So without those logs, and those of Trump Tower, we can't be sure there aren't more clandestine meetings like that blatant one in the White House. The refuse ANY degree of transparency. Again, if this was Clinton, the right would be demanding she be sent to Guantanamo Bay, and that's only a slight exaggeration, either way they'd demand she be locked up for the very things Trump is accused of.

Then there's his clear violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, and the people who claim to be all about the Constitution, saying how the left have zero respect for it, who were in a furor over Clinton's possible violation of it with her foundation, don't care about Trump's violation of it. Suddenly, the Emoluments Clause, doesn't matter to the same people who cited it as a concern during Clinton's campaign.

Also, keep in mind, he made the decision to fire him, before the reasons why letters were penned, and were written to help defend it. Further, as pointed out, his own letter was about him, the guy is such a clear narcissist, he could have been like Sanders and I'd personally oppose him. Plus, Trump didn't have the guts to let Comey know in person, Comey had to find out on TV and think it was a practical joke. Again, if Clinton fired somebody like that, the right would be in arms, calling her chicken, and saying a real man would fire another person in person.

TLDR: If Trump fired Comey after the investigation into a hostile state's interference with the election, nobody would have cared, in fact he may have gotten mad props for letting the investigation go on without interference. It's the timing that is suspect.

LOL, East Palo Alto. I volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club there for a year when I lived in Mountain View. Two cops got shot and East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate ever that year. It's utterly insane how on one side of the 101 you have these multi-million dollar mansions and Stanford University and on the other side you have gangland.

Meanwhile, back on topic, when I moved to Mountain View in 2002 my rent was $800 a month for a studio apartment. The rent went up by $100 a year every year until I finally called it quits in 2007 when they wanted to charge me $1300 a month. I gave up ever actually being able to own a home in the Bay Area (let alone rent) and left in 2009.

In Japan now, and things aren't quite as bad as the Bay Area, but we've been house hunting recently and we're shocked at the disparity between what we want versus what we can actually afford, even with both us being full-time professionals. I know that 2nd place he goes to is supposed to be a joke but it's not that far off from the truth, at least as far as our experiences go. While the places we've been shown by the real estate agent are certainly habitable, they aren't particularly nice. So we're going to have to decide whether we want to live someplace not so great with the advantage being the mortgage will be paid off by the time we retire or just rent in a place we're comfortable with and wind up having to really budget hard after retirement since rent will consume a sizable portion of our pensions/social security.

I assume (but don't know)---in the San Francisco sequence as he psychotically departs from the intersection of Hyde and Chestnut Street down the Hyde St cable car tracks towards the Ghiradelli Square/Aquatic Park area---that the black thing he is holding in his hand is some sort of control of for a disc brake on the rear wheels? The rotors and pads of which...would be glowing red hot and dripping bits of flaming debris as he comes to a stop before being mashed to by crossing traffic on Bay street at the bottom of the hill? Sort of like in those emergency runway brake tests they do for airliners?

michael bay seems to have a serious thing for 16 year old girls.

Sorry @ant, please don't take this personally.

Fuck you, Michael Bay. You're an awful filmmaker and you haven't managed to elicit 0.01% of the emotion I felt watching the animated Transformers movie as a kid and while that was basically just an extended toy commercial, at least it had... Christ, I dunno... balls? A sense of fun? A stupidly awesome 80s soundtrack?("Dare" is still on my running playlist and it brings a smile to my face every goddamn time)

Eh, screw this noise, I'm off to watch the Thor trailer again.

Tl;dr: there isn't enough alcohol on the planet to make me enjoy this abomination.