Writing on a local real estate blog, I noted the repair of some holes in a hillside sidewalk-staircases, and compared the city's filling-in of crumbling concrete steps to a time that I had repaired a partially-disintegrated cake by stuffing it with bread and slopping on layer upon layer of desperate icing. I was pretty pleased with that analogy until it was published, at which point commenters let me know exactly... [Read more...]

Extra photos for bloggers: 1, 2 We've seen slow versions of everything lately: slow food, slow travel, slow shopping, slow dentistry. (We might've made one of those up.) But have you tried slow photography? It's like a yoga class for your camera. Long conversations with subjects, patient exposures, and delicate macros will lend your photos a new calmness and longevity -- so vital in these rush-rush go-go slam-crash rock-and-roll... [Read more...]

Fact: the members of the Board of Supervisors meet to talk about governing and such at least once a week. Really! Will this finally be the week that they accomplish something? Probably not, but we salute their undying optimism. Keep plugging away, noble supervisors! You'll get the hang of it one of these days. Highlights of this week's meetings: advice for felons, Strangelovian restrictions on smoking, and ending the inexplicable... [Read more...]

A great philosopher once told us, "first, you must first learn to focus without focusing." Or maybe it was our optometrist. Whatever. It's deep. That transcendental magic is at the heart of Freelensing, a photographic process that begins with the removal of your lens. Freelensers simply hold unattached lenses in front their camera's exposed sensor, and delicately tilt it until focus emerges. Hand-manipulating a lens will reinvent your focal... [Read more...]

Nobody likes losing their job -- especially Muni drivers, who have it pretty sweet. But times are tough, thanks largely to local and state leaders who raid transit whenever their pet projects need more cash. At the beginning of the month, the Appeal predicted that service cuts and fare hikes are not far off; and sure enough, Muni's new budget has us paying more for less service as soon... [Read more...]

Numerous bus lines face further cutbacks and possible elimination later this year, according to the SF Appeal's analysis of data recently supplied by Muni as part of its Transit Effectiveness Project. Lines most at-risk include the 24-Divisadero, the 28-19th Ave, the 28L-19th Ave Limited, and the 23-Monterey. Muni's always been strapped for funds, but in the past decade they've faced unprecedented budget shortfalls and rapidly escalating fare inflation. Fares... [Read more...]

There are plenty of worse ways to spend a Thursday evening than in the company of an open bar, nerds, and a brisket; and that's where we found ourselves last night, at the showroom of K&D Furniture near the baseball park. "Geek Chic" was pitched as a tech/fashion-themed party, and that's what they got: everyone was a little bit nerd, a little bit chic, and not unlike pretty much... [Read more...]

Voting! Just like knocking on wood, rubbing a lucky penny, or wearing pants, it's one of those superstitious acts that somehow makes us feel safer despite the lack of any discernible benefit. Voting isn't easy, of course; because only jerks care about political news, most of us have no idea what's on the ballot or how we should vote. Making decisions is hard -- and that's why endorsements and... [Read more...]

"It starts from a love of the cute and furry animals," explained filmmaker Amy Do, director of Docfest's Rabbit Fever. "Kids start with them as pets, and it just keeps growing." The Appeal chatted with Amy before the premier of her documentary Sunday night at the Roxie, and asked her the same question that absolutely everyone must: why on Earth have you made a movie about competitive teenage rabbit breeding?... [Read more...]

Earlier this year, civil rights advocates celebrated when several New England states granted marriage rights to gay couples. But opponents are waging a campaign to eliminate the right to marry in Maine, and to eliminate rights like hospital visitation and death benefits for gay firefighters in Washington. These two battles could prove instrumental in California's upcoming battle to repeal Prop 8. The Maine campaign has shown care in learning... [Read more...]

What does it mean that Dick Costolo is Twitter's new COO? Observers are hopeful that Costolo will transform the service into something useful and appealling. Before coming to Twitter, he was the CEO of Feedburner, a service that allows websites to syndicate content and track subscribers -- sort of like a Nielsen rating for websites' news feeds. Those tools to measure readership and reach are exactly what Twitter lacks. Messages... [Read more...]

San Francisco's Mission District has entered a sort of Comic Art Renaissance lately, with last spring's opening of Caffeinated Comics and yesterday's launch of Mission: Comics and Art near 20th and Mission. Mission: Comics and Art is the brainchild of Leef Smith, a longtime comic reader and Mission resident. Back in October, his employer did him the favor of releasing him from wage slavery; and since his neighborhood had languished... [Read more...]

If the popularity contest between California's gubernatorial candidates is to be judged by Twitter followers, Gavin Newsom is beating Jerry Brown, with 994,857 versus 756,665 followers. Both are miles ahead of conservative candidate Meg Whitman's 3,093. And they all face stiff competition from the man they're trying to replace: Current governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has an army of 1,032,355. If you were to compare these numbers to the number of followers boasted by celebrities, Gavin... [Read more...]

It's been a bumpy ride for Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard who's planning to run against Barbara Boxer for her Senate seat in California. First there were questions about whether a company she claimed to run actually existed; then there were issues about her voting record -- or lack thereof -- and now it's emerged that under her leadership and despite a trade embargo, HP somehow found a... [Read more...]

Recent reports that San Francisco's Muni is "more reliable than ever" are a real headscratcher to anyone who was caught in Monday's subway meltdown. Despite Muni trapping passengers with no explanation on Monday, Gavin Newsom's mayoral office/gubernatorial campaign just sent out a press release touting the agency's on-time performance. How could the Gavinator be so out of touch? Maybe it's because Muni's keeping the mayor's office in the dark,... [Read more...]

Good news for the idle youth of Los Gatos: the city is in the process of decriminalizing an activty known, thrillingly, as "ball playing in the streets." The law, first enacted in the 1880s, prohibited Los Gatonians from throwing, catching, or striking a ball on a public thoroughfare. It may not be California's strangest law: according to one compilation of anachronistic orginances, in Los Angeles it's illegal to hunt for... [Read more...]

It wasn't really fair of us to go to last weekend's Zine Fest looking for comics -- they're not really the same thing, are they? But lately we've had our fill of the sharpies and scotch tape and fervent prose that is intensely personal and therefore almost completely incomprehensible. So it was with an eye for picture books that we wandered into what is charmingly called "The County Fair Building"... [Read more...]

With the goal of seeing a repeal of Proposition 8, California's ban on same-sex marriages, in the coming year, a group of civil rights activists from around the state met at San Francisco State University this past weekend. The debate between returning to the ballot in 2010 and 2012 has reached a fever pitch lately, with some organizations urging swift action and others seeking more time to prepare. Recently,... [Read more...]

Anyone who thinks that we learned from our mistakes with Prop 8 needs to take a look at this TV ad that just started airing in Maine. In case you hadn't heard, the anti-gay people who took over marriage in California have packed up and headed east--literally, it is exactly the same company that pushed Prop 8 -- to try to take over Maine's equal marriage laws. And we're starting... [Read more...]

Feeling chipper? Well, we'll soon take care of that! Local artist Lev Yilmaz has perfected the craft of gloom in his comics and videos; he has a new book out, and he's presenting a dramatic reading tonight and tomorrow. We've been fans since before his work started appearing on SFist, so we're delighted to have an opportunity to interview him. Or at least, we'll try to be delighted. It's... [Read more...]

San Jose is not to be outdone by Oakland's slight-less-smelly air and San Franciso's squeaky-clean city hall! They're going to start processing their organic waste, turning it into compost and methane at a plant sandwiched between a recycling plant and a solid waste processor. Sounds like a nice neighborhood. So what does this mean for San Francisco? We certainly produce no shortage of biological waste, much of it strolling... [Read more...]

Can we revive the recent conversation about faster Muni and growing population in the Richmond one more time? We'd like to point out this post about Transit-Oriented Design (TOD) on the blog of the same name. In a nutshell: Faster transit and denser populations go hand-in-hand: more space for people equals less space for cars, which equals more need for transit, traffic calming, and pedestrian amenities. Or you can... [Read more...]

San Francisco City Hall is an inescapable black hole! Okay, so everybody knows that already. But we're talking about electricity: every day, the building consumes power several hundreds of times greater than that of a residential building. Several HUNDRED times? How is that even possible? What is Mister Green Mayor DOING over there, splitting the atom? Fortunately, the Public Utilities Commission is working on cleaning up City Hall's act,... [Read more...]

Clean is the new filthy! This Sunday, menaced by the Newsom administration's war on fun, Up Your Alley has had to clean up their act a bit, lest they suffer the same cruel punishment as Halloween. So, new rule: NO LEWD BEHAVIOR. That means exposed sexing is a definite no-no; expulsion of bodily fluids is verboten; and nudity is, at best, iffy. But just because you can't have sex in... [Read more...]

No big surprise: the great new pedestrian plaza at Market and Castro has been extended for four more months. Well of course. Streetsblog reports "surprise and pleasure at how well the plaza is functioning" but who the hell is surprised that people would rather have a nice sit-down than dodge cars amongst baffling traffic lights? The conversation is now turning to making the plaza permanent -- it's still a... [Read more...]

We're not sure what to gasp about first with this story, so let's start with the largest number: 107 years, the age of the oil refinery Richmond. Of course, the equipment itself isn't that old -- it's only been around for a mere 70 years. (Practically brand new!) Chevron wants to replace the old equipment with newer machinery that, the company says, is better and cleaner. That sounds nice,... [Read more...]

California recently tried to take away $1 billion (billion!) in gas-tax funds from transit -- but no, the 3rd district court of appeal just ruled, the state can't do that. Voters approved the gas tax specifically to fund buses and trains, but so far Arnold's stolen $152 million from Muni, and $30 million from BART last year alone. The governor plans to appeal the ruling; so when fares to go... [Read more...]

If you do not fall completely under the spell of Jeffery and Cole Casserole upon your very first viewing, then we have nothing to discuss. The show stars 2 giddy young lads in a NYC apartment, furiously bombarding a webcam with comedy and, well, that's it. And we love it. "It's recession TV," Jeffery Self, one of the show's stars, told us when we reached him by phone. That's... [Read more...]

NextBus Information Systems responds to this piece here. Kind of. When Steven Peterson created Routesy, an iPhone app that lets riders see Muni arrival times, the last thing he expected was to hear was that Muni's real-time arrival times were actually the property of a private company located in the East Bay. But that's exactly what happened, when Alex Orloff, COO of a company calling itself NextBus Information Systems,... [Read more...]

On Monday, we pined for a walking tour of prominent local palm trees. And you delivered! Or more specifically, Jason Dewees, palm broker to the stars, delivered. He emailed to let us know about this fancy Google map that details the locations of over sixty amazing trees. We know what we are doing this weekend! Mr. Dewees, you have us eating out of the palm of your hand. Controversy... [Read more...]

["What Message Does This Sign Send?" by jm3] Here is a topic that may generate almost as many angry comments as our post comparing the Mission and Marina: according to the Christian Science Monitor (and pretty much everyone else), blacks are abandoning San Francisco. Er. Um. Yikes. The evidence seems pretty much impossible to argue with: blacks make up 6.7% of the population, down from 13.4% forty years ago.... [Read more...]

People sure are talking about prefab homes a lot lately. Sort of like scaling up your IKEA furniture until it's an entire building, these factory-built dwellings boast assembly-line efficiency that just isn't possible with on-site construction. The latest prefab headliner: ZETA Communities' experimental house in Oakland. ZETA (which stands for Zero Energy Technology and Architecture) is aiming to build homes that produce as much energy as they create, also... [Read more...]

UCSF celebrated the opening of its brand new Helen Diller Family Cancer Research Building yesterday afternoon. It's pretty much as noble a project as you'd expect from the name: studying various forms of cancer, the Mission Bay building will more than double UCSF's lab space. It is, to put it mildly, a very good thing. But the building's buzz isn't limited to the medical field: we're seeing a lot... [Read more...]

Because Nate Silver won't respond to the saucy love letters we keep sending him, we've had to resort to this to get his attention: a statistical analysis of endorsements for Tuesday's election. (BTW: There's an election on Tuesday.) We combed through every major endorsement we could find -- about seventy -- and charted out who was saying yes and who was saying no. We counted newspapers like the LA Times... [Read more...]

It seems like every day, there's a new online database of people who are publicly opposed to gays -- but each time it happens, the list is shorter and shorter. The latest one is in Arkansas, and it lists the folks who signed a petition to keep foster kids in orphanages rather than placing them with gay parents. (The petition was eventually voted into law, and is now being... [Read more...]

23andMe presents data in a user-friendly format. Someday, doctors may be able to drill deeper into the information to provide patients with more informed treatment. In the not-too-distant future, doctors won't just measure your height and weight -- they'll also peer into the little cellular hard drives that make you who you are. Genotypes are the next big thing in personal health care, and if we may sound like... [Read more...]

Before we get to the nitty-gritty, we just want to make sure that everyone knows that tonight's Prop 8 town hall at the Veteran's Building has been postponed indefinitely. We'll let you know if there's an update on that.  Everybody got it? Okay, good. Now, on to the details: We'd say between 75 and 100 people showed up for the panel discussion "Prop 8 and Race: What's Next?" The title... [Read more...]

So what's the deal with the next round of Prop 8 protests? Oh, we are so glad you asked. The next big one in SF is this Saturday at 10:30am at City Hall. The organizers put out a call for help -- they need folks to put up flyers, among other things. So, if you've got some spare time, what worthier cause could there be? There's also a protest... [Read more...]

Oh, sure, you've seen all the coverage of Jan Gehl's plan to turn Fisherman's Wharf into something tolerable. But wouldn't you like to know more? The excellent SPUR is holding a forum TODAY about the city's plan to alleviate pedestrian-congestion by updating the neighborhood's 1950s-style freeway-inspired urban design: widening sidewalks, installing benches, and adding bike lanes, injunction be damned. After all, be honest: when's the last time you went to... [Read more...]

A few days ago, there was a new ad released by the people backing Prop 8 (the ballot amendment that would allow an out-of-state group to veto whatever California marriages they want). The ad condemned gay marriage and featured "Professor" Richard Peterson (pictured at right) making a number of demonstrably false suggestions. You can watch the ad here -- don't forget to rate! Thankfully, the lawyers for No On... [Read more...]

Good news: Translink will be up and running on Muni in the late fall/early winter of 2007. Or at least, that's what Muni said last year, and surprise! It's still not working. (And before that, it was January of 2007.) Translink is the work of a company called ERG, Ltd (emphasis on the "limited"); and in the decades (decades!) that it's been bandied about, lots of other cities have... [Read more...]

Well, whaddya know. No sooner did we lavish praise upon the SF County Transportation Authority than Nat Ford, head of Muni, decided that he might be interested in committing a hostile takeover of the SFCTA... thereby making the TA as flawless as Muni. Good idea! If our agency was melting down, and there was another one making us look bad, we might want to buy it and run it... [Read more...]

Update: See Paul's comment below about why they had to do what they did, and what they're doing about it. Are there quiet, law-abiding people on Sixth Street? Sure, but it's hard to stand out when your neighborhood looks like something out of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome -- take a walk down 6th, especially at night, and you'll find yourself surrounded by brawls, the mentally ill, drug deals, screaming... [Read more...]

Whoops, sorry we're so late getting this post up -- we lost our notes and tore up the house before resigning ourselves to the idea that somewhere, someone is going to find a notebook with "the lighter side of rape" scrawled across the first page. That comment refers to Give Piece of Ass a Chance, a new Bruce LaBruce short that preceeded Starrbooty. It's a speculative spoofing of the... [Read more...]

Say hello to your new next door neighbor: a parking garage. Petitioners are currently collecting signatures for a "build more parking" petition, but the terms are insane: it wouldn't just allow developers to install big garages, it would require that all new homes build on extra parking, at the expense of living space. Require! As in, the government says that you don't have a choice! More room for cars means... [Read more...]

Ever since Alberta, the best drink-mixer EVER, vanished from behind the bar at the Orbit Room, we haven't been back. It's been a dark, dry time. But now the bartendress-shaped void in our life has been filled by cocktailsonthefly.tv, Alberta's new webby home! The most important booze-slinger in town is now starring in professionally-shot drink-making tutorials, highlighting her talent for combining fresh fruit and top-notch booze. We're talking about... [Read more...]

Muni drivers, caught on tape! Again! This time, the driver doesn't come off quite so sympathetically. We caught the 33 home last night after hanging out at a high school cafeteria, and what's this? Not only is driver 1870 flirting with a friend, but she's perched on his headrest and fussing around in his little driver's nook? Our Lois Lane instincts taking over, we whipped out our phone, turned... [Read more...]

Get ready to go down a transit rabbit hole. Last time we wrote about the crapfest that is 511.org, one of our commenters placed blame on military contractors. So we dusted off our Encyclopedia Brown magnifying glass to see just what's behind one of the noisiest, user-unfriendliest, pedestrian-discouragingest, bicyclist-overlookingest websites in town. The short answer: our local 511.org (just like five-elevens all over the country) is largely a project... [Read more...]

How is it that you've never heard of The Ballad of Halo Jones? It's been around for about 20 years, so you have absolutely no excuse for not diving into this unjustifiably unknown sci-fi pleasure. The year is 4950 or so, and life sucks for a group of young women living in a messy unemployment colony called "The Hoop." Mean aliens, dangerous criminals, and inescapable poverty drive some folks to... [Read more...]

We don't have anything funny to say about this one -- we're simply at a loss. Rumor had it yesterday that Gavin picked Stuart Sunshine to be his new Deputy Chief of Staff, and now the mayor's Director of Communications Peter Ragone (not to be confused with houseguest John Nelson) has confirmed it. Stuart will be leaving the MTA and moving to the mayor's administration, where he'll be "focusing on... [Read more...]

When the Party-Party folks started agitating to Dump Dufty, we couldn't wait to see who'd step up to the plate. Who would dare run against a celebrated gay man in the gayest gay district of a city populated entirely by gay homosexual gays? Alix Rosenthal (pictured at right, hovering majestically above the treetops), that's who. Bevan, can you hover majestically? We didn't think so. Alix is an attorney and civil... [Read more...]

Dust off your dancing shoes, San Francisco! You DO have dancing shoes, don't you? No, your galoshes don't count. Wait, have you been wearing those since Folsom? Eww. Aaaaaaaaanyway, this Saturday, at 8pm on the Van Ness side of City Hall, a gaggle of frolickers plan to converge and dance. (Backup location: Patricia's/Hayes Green.)It's Flashdance Four, a temporary party hosted by local flashmobby gadfly Amandeep Jawa. He brings speakers and... [Read more...]

Oh we've got some tough cookies this week, yes sir. Fresh from the macho shelves at Isotope and onto your manly plate come The Boys, about a group of vigilantes taking revenge against reckless superheros; The Savage Brothers, about a team of zombie bounty hunters; and Casanova, which is difficult to interpret but appears to relate to some kind of slick superspying. Let's kick it off with The Savage... [Read more...]

Jack is shy and artsy, which isn't helping him with his primary goal: attracting chicks. "Jack and Lucky," by bay-area artist Anthony Hon, chronicles the travails of a lonely, horny 20-something. Oh and also, and this is never explained but somehow doesn't seem all that out of the ordinary, he lives with a giant talking 300-pound cat. Like the talking monkey in Rob Osborne's 1000 Steps to World Domination,... [Read more...]

"Finally, we have our own gay American Pie," Frameline board member and friend-of-SFist Glenn Kiser said as he introduced Another Gay Movie. Frameline sneak-peek-screened the film last month to a sold-out audience, and now it finally opens tonight at the Castro. And, yeah, that's a fairly accurate description: it's a naughty, goofy, lowbrow romp (yes! that's right! a romp!) about a team of gay kids who want nothing more out... [Read more...]

We've been closely following this strange attempt by Bevan & Friends to put a stop to Halloween parties in the Castro -- including private house parties. Check out the coverage of Bevan's Wednesday meeting on our Party-Party friends' site; party member Adam reports that the meeting was populated mostly by businesspeople, not residents, and that the primary complains were that revelers relieved themselves in locations other than restrooms, that hate... [Read more...]

When we're reading comics about hard-boiled female reporters unflinchingly uncovering terrible secrets during a time of war, we don't want to see delicate ladies -- we want to see take-no-prisoners broads. Like the classic plucky Lois Lane, or like trousers-wearing Amy Archer in The Hudsucker Proxy, or like the tenacious Nina Totenburg. The character of Charlotte Hemming, in Ian Edgington and Matt Brooker's Scarlet Traces: The Great Game, does not... [Read more...]

You know how it is sometimes to look at photos from the 80s, where it's all cute young cheeks and happy tow-headed promise, and now twenty years later all the kids in the pictures have been worn down by their dreams falling apart and everything they love being taken away? (Or at least, that's how we feel when we listen to Bright Eyes.) So anyway, issue three of Joshua W.... [Read more...]

Before we get to this week's comic books, we must first point out that Issue 2 of Kevin McShane's Toupydoops has, as the kids say, hit the stands. (We reviewed Issue 1 a few weeks ago.) This latest installment sees our heros standing in line to get into a club where, it turns out, everybody sucks. Poseurs and floozies and five dollar beers deflate their enthusiasm for Los Angeles, but... [Read more...]

Get ready to throw a cow-sized steak on the OMG WTF barbecue, because we've got Muni news that'll make your socks go up and down. You know NextBus? That thing that lets you know when the next bus is coming, so you don't have to memorize arrival times and count on Muni drivers adhering to schedule? And you know how NextBus only works right now for a couple of... [Read more...]

We've said it before and we'll say it again: You are all a bunch of weirdos. There was probably no greater message than that to be gleaned from Saturday night's CineKink screenings; that all humans are strange and kinky creatures, and the ones who don't admit it are the weirdoiest of them all. The NYC-based fest flogs itself as a celebration of "alternative sexuality," a term almost as ambiguous and... [Read more...]

The only thing more shocking than Charo consenting to an interview with SFist is that there are people in the world who don't know who she is. For those philistines, here's a quick recap: Charo is a Spanish superstar of song, dance, and guitar, known for her eccentric catchphrase ("coochi coochi"), wild ensembles, a record-setting number of Loveboat guest appearances, and a speech pattern that is unpredictable, frantic, and... [Read more...]

Maybe, like us, you weren't lucky enough to catch the Frameline screening of Joy of Life last month. But fear not: this Monday (the eleventh), Jenni Olson's narrative-documentary-ish film premiers at the Castro, and plays until the fourteenth. It's hard to pin The Joy of Life down to any one genre of film; it consists of contemplative footage of San Francisco, accompanied by a calm voiceover, reading what sound like... [Read more...]

It's not easy watching somebody die, but Tammy Faye: Death Defying relishes every minute. Slow piano music, swooshy overproduced graphics, gosh-darn-it voiceovers by the lady herself, and crying -- oh God, so much crying -- might leave you thinking that Ms. Messner's the first person to ever need chemotherapy. A mundane follow-up to the incredible The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Death Defying strips away so much of Tammy Faye's... [Read more...]

So, let's say that you've decided that your image needs an overhaul. Maybe your current look is wearing thin; it's just not you, the crowd is tired, the music sucks. And there's that nagging voice within us all that pipes up every now and makes us dream about one day casting it all off and growing giant ears, whiskers, and a soft huggable pelt. "I do it because it's fun,"... [Read more...]