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True believers

04.05.10 - 3:37 pm | Dick Meister |
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The best season of the year is finally here. Baseball season. Sure, it's only a game - but it’s a game that can be very serious business to the young people who play it.

I once was one of them, playing in the 1940s and 1950s on some of the many semi-professional teams that once were common in San Francisco, as in many other cities, as well as on teams in the Mendocino County, Southwestern Oregon and Western Canadian Leagues. Read more »

Game Theory: San Francisco ShEvil Dead vs. Oakland Outlaws, 4/3/10

04.05.10 - 2:54 pm | Caitlin Donohue |
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Caitlin Donohue isn't a sports writer. But she sure likes to win. Check out the last installment of "Game Theory" here. Oh, and give us a shout if you've got a big game coming up in the Bay.

I expected a lot from my first roller derby. Clotheslining, fishnets, snarling. Beer. I had high hopes. And I found all that -- and believe me, I found it good, you don’t get $3 Pyramid Ales at just any sporting event. But I also stumbled unwittingly into a world of highly unorthodox female empowerment, a world where ladies have serious thigh muscles and sweat blithely through their heavy makeup. It’s a place that reclaims sports for the XX chromosones of today. And I liked it.

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Not minor: Man/Miracle

04.05.10 - 2:18 pm | Kimberly Chun |
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One of the nicer surprises this year has to be The Shape of Things (Third Culture), the debut recording by busy Oakland-by-way-of-Santa Cruz foursome Man/Miracle. No, you don’t get Cruz-ish untrammeled psychedelia of Sleepy Sun nor the noise blues of Comets on Fire nor the spooked folk of Emily Jane White here. Read more »

Momentum shifts against sit-lie

04.05.10 - 2:03 pm | Steven T. Jones |
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Proponents of criminalizing sitting or lying on San Francisco sidewalks have seen their prospects of success steadily dwindle in the last week, starting with the creative and well-covered Stand Against Sit-Lie protests on March 27 and continuing through last week’s Planning Commission vote against the measure to yesterday’s debate on BBC’s The World, in which opponent Andy Blue clearly bested proponent Ted Loewenberg. Read more »

Will Whitman's spending backfire?

04.05.10 - 12:46 pm | Tim Redmond |
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The political graveyards of California are littered with the bones of candidates who tried to get elected to statewide office on the basis of their own great wealth. Steve Westly, Al Checchi, Jane Harmon, Michael Huffington, Darrell Issa ... lots of people though they could buy the job of governor or senator. Most of them failed -- in part because they couldn't craft a message that appealed to the voters.Read more »

Why does the Catholic Church still exist?

04.05.10 - 11:52 am | Tim Redmond |
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Johnny Angel Wendell, who wrote a piece for us this week about talk radio, does a show Sunday night on LA's KTLK radio called Southern California Live, and this week -- on Easter Sunday -- he had a great rant about the Catholic Church. Read more »

One question for Tiger Woods

04.05.10 - 11:28 am | Tim Redmond |
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So Tiger Woods is finally talking to the press. I don't get invited to the press conferences at Augusta National (imagine that), but if I were there, I'd have tried to ask exactly one question:

Mr Woods: Can you explain why your personal life is any business of anyone in this room -- and if you can't, then why don't you stop answering questions about it?Read more »

It's raining reindeer babies in Alaska

04.05.10 - 9:16 am | Sarah Phelan |
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Whenever I want to find out the goods on Republican nutjob Sarah Palin I turn to www.themudflats.net, which also happens to be a great blog about all things Alaska. Read more »

Toothsome pie worthy of its cult following: Emilia’s Pizzeria

04.03.10 - 12:40 pm | Kimberly Chun |
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I think I embarrassed Emilia’s Pizzeria owner and chef Keith Freilich when I called him out as prominently featured in Sunset magazine’s recent Bay Area pizza roundup (one question on that, regarding the bit about Flour and Water being located on an abandoned, seedy stretch of the Mission -- did the writer ever notice the relatively new yup-scale lofts blossoming all around that block?). Hey, it’s worth noting since Emilia’s is likely the least showy pizzeria of the entire lot. Read more »

Getting into the Afro-psych groove: Witch

04.03.10 - 11:42 am | Kimberly Chun |
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The juicy goodness of excellent psych is worth revisiting no matter how far back it was released -- hence this darting glance at Witch, the Zambian ‘70s rock fivesome, and its 1975 full-length, Lazy Bones!!,  released a few months back by QDK Media. Licensed from vocalist Emanyeo Jagari Chanda (the last surviving member of the group is now a foreman at a uranium mining operation in a remote Zambian village) , this gem from the so-called Zam Rock scene rumbles as fiercely as any combo off an early Nuggets comps (see badass rump-shaker “Off Ma Boots”). Read more »

The Daily Blurgh: Splinters of the cross

04.02.10 - 3:38 pm | Matt Sussman |
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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

"An unbelievably hermetically sealed spherical inalienable maze of light and sound seeing imagery expand in every direction.”

I was reminded of the words of visionary architect and late SF resident Achilles Rizzoli – who spent his life drafting gorgeous symbolic portraits of friends, family, and loved ones as fantastic buildings, the cornerstones of which would never be laid – when I saw this Wired video that Boing Boing posted about Rohnert Park artist Scott Weaver's enormous sculpture of San Francisco done entirely in toothpicks.

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ACORN did not commit voter registration violations

04.02.10 - 3:10 pm | Sarah Phelan |
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One of the craziest aspects of the whole ACORN saga has been how rightwing lies about the organization have been repeated so often that they have come to replace the truth in most people's minds.

For instance, according to the Office of California Attorney General Jerry Brown, there are no reports of votes that were cast fraudulently, thanks to anything ACORN did. Read more »

And if you're following the latest Vatican scandal ...

04.02.10 - 2:00 pm | Tim Redmond |
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... and you're reading about the Pope and his ol' chum from San Francisco, and how the Catholic League blames homosexuals for the pedophilia scandal, and how the Vatican now equates bad press to the Holocaust, you might enjoy this nice little video. Read more »

Judge sets hearing on contempt order for SF Weekly's bank

04.02.10 - 12:37 pm | Tim Redmond |
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Superior Court Presiding Judge James McBride April 1 granted a motion by the San Francisco Bay Guardian to set a hearing for the Bank of Montreal, the lead bank for the SF Weekly and its parent chain, to show cause why it should not be held in contempt of court for interfering with a judge's order in the Guardian's attempt to collect on its $2l million plus judgment in a 2008 predatory pricing trial.

McBride set the hearing for April 30 and said that he would not hear the case but would assign another judge to hear it.Read more »

Did Fox dump Yee to spare Palin?

04.02.10 - 12:24 pm | Steven T. Jones |
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Fox News seems to be having a hard time playing the victim card in the controversy over Sarah Palin’s upcoming speech at a cash-strapped California State University campus, for which she’s being paid an undisclosed -- but likely huge -- amount of money. And the network has been jerking around the chief critic of the deal, Sen. Leland Yee (D-SF), as it looks for a way to martyr poor Palin, a new Fox News commentator. Read more »