AND IN SPORTS ... don't look now but the 49ers are back in the play-offs, just three major miracles away from going all the way. This after a much shorter than expected hiatus from respectability. What's it been? Two years? Three? Why, when I was a kid ...

I know we're not supposed to draw life lessons from professional sports – at least not here in alternative weeklyworld – but sometimes you just gotta, and this is one of those times, the life lessons being so dang obvious: trade down in the draft, draft defense, and just listen to Bill Walsh in general.

Other than which, my only advice is to eat as often as possible at the D&A Cafe on Clement Street, and to eat there, as often as possible, between three and six in the afternoon, when they have their $2 happy hour specials. Count 'em, 27 items to choose from, including French toast and all kinds of porridge, including my personal favorite, pig's liver porridge, and my personal least favorite, pig's blood porridge.

Do you understand what I'm getting at here? French toast? Porridge? In other words: breakfast! They practically encourage it. The way I figure, you can have breakfast at three (say French toast and/or porridge), lunch at four (say "chicken macaroni" or some other kind of soup), and dinner at five (say shish kebab beef with french fries, fried squid, or chicken wings or something). I don't mean to plan your menu for you. The important thing is three very square meals for maybe 10 clams total. And by six you ought to be good and ready for bed, so imagine the money you'll save on bar tabs, movies, and taking Grandma in a champagne-stocked limousine to see Willie Nelson at the Fillmore by way of a belated Groundhog's Day present.

With savings of this magnitude, you can probably afford to quit your job and sleep till two, two-thirty, depending how long it takes you to get dressed and down to the D&A for breakfast again by three.

I saw the French toast. It looked good: thick sliced and buttered by real butter ... syrup instead of soy sauce (because did I mention that this is a Chinese restaurant). At 5:30, when me and Crawdad showed up, the place was packed. There was even a little line, which we waited in for less than five minutes before being seated. My point being that other than us two, everyone in the place was Asian – which some people see as a good omen for Chinese restaurants, even if half of the all-Asian clientele is eating French toast or french fries or chicken macaroni.

To me, I don't care who all's eating exactly what exactly where; if they're eating whatever they're eating for $2, that's what I call a good omen. That's happy hour.

We got four things, which was more than enough for the two of us, even though one of us was me. We got fried chicken wings ($2), green-onion pancakes ($2), pork chop noodle soup ($2), and chicken macaroni ($2), because I had to know what the hell they meant by chicken macaroni, and the waitressperson didn't speak enough English to help.

Well, what it was was a bowl of chicken soup with elbow macaroni instead of noodles – real Chinese-style noodles, I mean, like the pork chop noodle soup had in it. The pork chops were fried, which is always good news, even in soup, and it was a bigger bowl than the macaroni one, but you know what? I think I liked the chicken macaroni even better. Didn't like the green-onion pancakes. Loved the wings, which were unclipped, unbattered huge ones, three of them, freshly fried to the perfect crispness and just as juicy as ... I don't know, soup or something.

Now, these 27 happy-hour dishes are not as big nor necessarily as good as the hundred-plus regular menu items, some of which we saw going by and hankered for, retrospectively – but they're not off of no steam table, either. They're freshly made, good, and bigger at any rate than dim sum, or tapas, or anything else you might find out there for $2.

Atmospherically, you've got dirty napkins all over the floor, ugly booths with powder blue seats and pinkish tables, mostly posterized menus full of often inedible-sounding stuff (i.e., "pork's blood & skin w/ chive") by way of wall art, and, on the minus side, karaoke videos on TV instead of sports, for example. I don't know what else to say, except that I loved it there, and I'll be back and back and back – maybe even at an unhappy hour some day if, say, someone else is buying.