Portal:San Francisco Bay Area

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), also called Order of Perpetual Indulgence (OPI) is a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses drag and religious imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance and satirize issues of gender and morality. At their inception in 1979, a small group of gay men in San Francisco began wearing the attire of nuns in visible situations using high camp to draw attention to social conflicts and problems in the Castro District.

The Sisters have grown throughout the U.S. and are currently organized as an international network of orders, which are mostly non-profit charity organizations that raise money for AIDS, LGBT-related causes, and mainstream community service organizations, while promoting safer sex and educating others about the harmful effects of drug use and other risky behaviors. In San Francisco alone where they continue to be the most active, between 1979 and 2007 the Sisters are credited with raising over $1 million for various causes, or almost $40,000 on average per year. (more...)

Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, and inventor, who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he is widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields, transforming “one industry after another, from computers and smartphones to music and movies.” Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar. Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, a year later, the Macintosh. He also played a role in introducing the LaserWriter, one of the first widely available laser printers, to the market. (more...)

Sunnyvale (/ˈsʌniveɪl/ or /ˈsʌnivəl/), officially the City of Sunnyvale, is a city located in Santa Clara County, California. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population was 140,095.

The city is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is the seventh most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sunnyvale is bordered by portions of San Jose to the north, Moffett Federal Airfield to the northwest, Mountain View to the west, Los Altos to the southwest, Cupertino to the south, and Santa Clara to the east. It lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101.

As part of the Silicon Valley, high-tech companies such as Juniper Networks, Fortinet, AMD, NetApp, Spansion, Yahoo!, AppliedMicro and Ariba are headquartered there. Sunnyvale is also home to several aerospace/defense companies; Lockheed Martin has a major facility in Sunnyvale, and Honeywell, Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems - Marine Systems (formerly Joshua Hendy Iron Works), Finisar, and Spirent also have offices in Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale was also the home to Onizuka Air Force Station, where its memorial building was locally known as the Blue Cube. The base, named for the deceased Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Ellison Onizuka, was an artificial satellite control facility of the United States armed forces until August 2010. (more...)

 • The San Francisco Unified School District is established, as the first public school district in California (historic Ida B. Wells High School building pictured, right)
 • The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance is formed in response to rampant crime and corruption in the municipal government (1851 hanging pictured, left)
 • Congregation Emanu-El is chartered in San Francisco
 • A fire destroys large swaths of San Francisco

• ... that the vivid colors of the San Francisco Bay Salt Ponds (pictured), ranging from magenta to blue-green, come from the brine shrimp and microorganisms that thrive in the water?
• ... that the Laguna Creek watershed debouches into the San Francisco Bay near the site of the ghost town of Drawbridge?
• ... that the chase scene from the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt starts on Cesar Chavez Street (then Army Street) before continuing through San Francisco?
• ... that the title of There There, a 2018 novel about urban Indians in Oakland, California, mirrors Gertrude Stein's quip about the city that "There is no there there"?

• ... that David A. Shirley was the first chemist to become the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory?
  
• ... that architect Howard Backen is credited with being a large influence on the architectural aesthetic of Napa? (Backen designed restaurant pictured)
  
• ... that the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard unsuccessfully tried to decontaminate the aircraft carrier USS Independence, (pictured) then packed the ship full of nuclear waste and scuttled it near the Farallon Islands in 1951?
• ... that Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeffrey F. Rosen stated that "the punishment does not fit the crime" in the sentencing of Brock Turner by judge Aaron Persky to six months of jail and three years of probation?
  
• ... that the unfinished Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit fleet will consist of nine two-car Nippon Sharyo DMU trainsets? (set pictured)
  
• ... that Girls of the Golden West, an opera based on the letters of California Gold Rush writer Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, with music by John Adams (pictured) and a libretto by Peter Sellars, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, jointly with Dallas Opera, the Dutch National Opera (De Nationale Opera) and Teatro La Fenice, Venice?
• ... that on the 1999 passing of University of California, Berkeley historian Woodrow Borah, it was said “[There] disappears the last great figure in the generation that presided over the vast expansion of the Latin American scholarly field in the United States during the years following World War II.”

June 2016

The Luther Burbank Rose Parade and Festival is an annual festival held in Santa Rosa celebrating the work of Luther Burbank, and centered on the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens (pictured). It began in 1894, and today has a budget of $100,000, with up to 250,000 attending.

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