And They Are Indisputable (Bay Area Edition)

These are the facts:

• There's a scale of quality of chinese restaurants in a place like San Francisco's Chinatown. If the place has no apparent name and it looks like it violates a hundred different parts of the health code, it's great. If they advertise and, when you go in, there are more white people than not, it's probably not so great. Unfortunately, we ended up in the latter today.
• The mall in San Francisco at Powell and Market Streets is clearly the nicest mall I've ever been in, besides the one at Ceasar's in Vegas. It has interactive directories -- you use a touch screen to find stores and it gives you walking directions to get there. The food court is a bunch of high-end places (most Asian, of course) where they give you real plates and someone cleans up after you.
• People who buy certain things at certain stores are stupid, I'm sorry. At above mall, we were looking for a gift and went into Coach. Forget their purses (which are understandably expensive), their keychains were priced from $28 to $58. It's not a status symbol; if you pay thirty dollars for a keychain you're dumb.
• A block away from Fisherman's Wharf, there's a Joe's Crab Shack. Is there a drug that will give people a seafood allergy? If so, anyone who decides to eat at Joe's Crab Shack at freaking Fisherman's Wharf needs to be injected with it so they can never eat seafood again.
• Katherine Heigl is a nightmare. It has nothing to do with San Francisco, but she is.
• Riding on the cable car, you get a great chance to admire all of the townhouses on the hills and I've always thought it would be cool to live in one of them. I remember eight or nine years ago, when I would hear that they cost around $500,000 and I would think, "That's insane! Even with such a great location, who would ever think of paying anywhere close to that much for just a townhouse!" Not that mine cost nearly that much, but times have changed all the same, huh?
• A great day was capped off by going to the Coliseum to watch the A's thump the evil Yankees. Good times. Justin Duchscherer is one heck of a pitcher -- he was great in his seven innings and he threw a couple of offspeed pitches that made Jeter and Rodriguez look like amateurs. You have to hand it to the Yankee brand though. They practically sold out a stadium 3,000 miles away. Even if it was mostly A's fans, they still came to see the Empire -- what would normally be a $2 ticket night was regular pricing because Oakland knew they'd sell the tickets.