It's the Fourth of July! Streamers! Bunting! Brass bands! And in San Francisco.... the opening of the hotly-anticipated SF Mime Troupe production in Dolores Park! The acidly-political theater group (note: not actually mimes, though it would actually be hilarious if one year they did do an entire production in mime) is putting on free performances of "Making a Killing" every weekend at local parks throughout the area until October. This year's play is about......

Well, that was a grim Daily Californian homepage yesterday. The top six stories: pedestrian hit by car on Telegraph; Berkeley summer camp evacuated due to Tahoe fire, body found near the Berkeley Marina, beloved local activist hit by train, Cal student to be tried for killing David Halberstam, and memorials for the local murder-suicide family. On the bright side, the other article on the home page is that Cal basketball star DeVon Hardin has decided......

This thing about the three-year-old who accidentally killed a family friend in Alameda is too weird. So the kid apparently found a gun in his house and started waving it around in the living room. As his parents tried to disarm him, the gun went off and killed a guy hanging out in the house. Turns out the gun is owned by the cousin of the man who was shot, who may or may not be a gang member, and who may or may not be fleeing to Mexico. They've also taken the child into protective custody because they're afraid the gang member might retaliate against him. Surely no one in the gang thinks it's the kid's fault, do they? Further freaking us out, it turns out the 3-year-old has already witnessed someone getting murdered before, when a cousin was shot in front of him in El Sobrante. Attack of the sea lion! The good folks at the Berkeley Marina have been reduced to shooting water hoses in the face of a surly sea lion on the dock, who attacked three people on Wednesday alone. Most dramatically, the 1,500 lb. male grabbed a woman by the ankle and tried to drag her into the water, in what a witness described as "a virtual tug of war." The sea lion also tried to eat someone's backpack, but decided it wasn't to his liking. And early this morning, the cops shot (non-fatally) a guy fleeing from the scene of an armed robbery at 14th and Belcher in Duboce Triangle. Cops found the car the robber was in, but the robber refused to stop. They chased the car into a dead end in SoMa, at which point the driver tried to ram the cops in reverse. The cops then fired, and the driver kept going in reverse until he hit a tree. The driver then took off (in drive) again but was ultimately stopped at Townsend and Second. ...