Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Beware of teary raccoon eyes when in Davis.

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It's no battleship Potemkin but the cruiser Varyag, which recently docked in our waters, is no slouch. Neither is its "relaxation cabin."

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Speaking of Russia, a Moscow metro station was recently made-over in honor of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the morbid results sound both hideous and captivating:

"The station, called Dostoyevskaya, is decorated with brooding grey and black mosaics that depict violent scenes from the 19th-century writer's best-known novels. One mural re-enacts the moment when the main character in Crime and Punishment murders an elderly pawnbroker and her sister with an axe."

Maybe BART or MUNI could follow suit? They could have so much fun with Hammett, Norris, or Maupin.

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"Let's don't burlesque this," to become the new, "don't get it twisted?"

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Ladies and gentleman, unsung gay icon and artist James Bidgood: "I guess people expect me to be lounging around in a silk caftan, face powdered and roughed with twenty yards of orchid chiffon draped around my neck with my bong and a few boys by my pool! Very often guests like yourself think I only work in this slum dwelling, but I live here! There is so little room, I sleep on a twin mattress twice as old as you are, half of which is occupied by a six-foot plaster male store mannequin. I use it to build paper mache forms on and for draping costumes because a regular dressmaker form doesn’t work for the kind of costumes I make, if ya get my meanin’! There’s nowhere else left to put the damn thing, so I got a man in bed with me every night – where he’s of no use at all, like sleepin’ with a cold corpse!"

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The end of the rainbow? SF Pride "bans" openly gay DJs due to sponsorship with Clear Channel.

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Mid-century architectural madness revealed in Presidio Heights.

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Happy birthday, Meryl. May you remain forever young: