And now, some nice puppies that need your help... December has been an unfortunate month for Bernal Heights and fires. One fire that we haven't discussed yet is one that happened on December 22nd. In this Bernal Fire, Rocket Dog Rescue founder Pali Boucher became homeless and lost three fostered rescue dogs all in the blink of an eye. Since 2001, Boucher has been rescuing otherwise doomed doggies from Bay Area shelters, nursing them back......

A two-alarm fire at Bernal Heights home caused the displacement of two elderly folks. The blaze happened at 266 Nevada Street around 6:30 p.m. this evening. According to the Gate, "[f]irefighters found the home's two residents inside and brought them out to safety." Aw. Our heroes! Anyway, other than one of the rescued Bernal residents suffering from breathing trouble -- who was hospitalized for a short period of time -- no other injuries were......

-- Perverts. [ASD] -- San Francisco to go solar. [Curbed] -- SUV rampage remembered. [SFGate] -- Bernal Heights robbers? Oh noes! [The Snitch] -- The McKesson Corporation sued. Also, SFBG's got the love for the Examiner? [SFBG] -- The handitards over at Best Buy apologize for sending Scott Beale an inane cease & desist missive. Classic stuff, folks. [Laughing Squid] -- Blueprint -- it's not a good thing. (Eh.) [ValleyWag]......

We got word today from an anonymous source that two residents of Bernal Heights -- including a former President of Golden Gate Audubon Society -- spotted a burrowing owl a block from their house on the southeastern side of the hill. The (sub?)species was confirmed by another Audubon-er. So, why does this matter? Because at the moment there is construction going on in the same area (i.e., landscaping improvements such as steps, etcetera) where......

Photos from the annual soap box derby...

Aspiring painters of urban village scenes would do well to get themselves to Bernal Heights at once. From the armada of sandwich boards and the pony-tailed guy enjoying a pensive cup of coffee at Progressive Grounds, to the verdant street trees and the pair of rowdy sidewalk philosophers holding court near the eastern end of the block, it’s quite the bustling display along Cortland Ave. Private lives seem a low priority here, as even the back yards of local bars, cafés, and restaurants are open for business. Sidewalk rest stops are a big calling card on Cortland between Andover and Bennington, the heart of Bernal Heights’ vibrant commercial district. There are benches in front of restaurants (Valentina Ristorante), benches in front of salons (Bernal Heights Nail Care), benches in front of markets (The Good Life Grocery), benches in front of saloons (Wild Side West). The result: A remarkable feeling of community, evinced by how it appears as if everyone might actually know everyone else’s name. It’s like a West Coast version of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry...only on Cortland, there’s no Barney Fife. Auditions may or may not be held regularly at Skip’s Tavern and Wild Side West for the role of Otis the Harmless Town Drunk....

-- Heklina (writing for SF Weekly again) on our newly crowned drag king. [The Snitch] -- Something or other about the state budget. [SJ Merc] -- Oakland man murdered on his birthday while being a good Samaritan. Suspect still at large, or on their way to the ninth circle of hell. [Chron] -- Bonds' 756th homer ball goes up for auction. [Examiner] -- Devaughndre Broussard: soooo the fall guy. [Oakland Tribune] -- Bernal Heights......

Four blocks of Bernal Heights have no water service right now: a cement truck doing repairs on Folsom Street tipped over earlier this morning, injuring the driver and damaging the water line. Two blocks of Powhattan and two blocks of Folsom are affected, they're hoping to get water back on by the mid-afternoon. Picture of the repairs on Folsom from the PUC website......

Here's todays wrap up the daily news stories....

To Little Miss Golden Gate Park, princess of the City,

Honey, I'm sick of you and your flat-ass panhandle getting all the attention. You think you're the only park in the whole City of San Francisco? Well listen up greenbeard, 'cause it's time somebody showed you the real San Francisco.

You know that sparkling brilliance that lights up the night sky south of Chavez? That's me GG, and my name is Miss McLaren Park -- Lady McLaren if you're nasty.

Quick -- which one of those pictures above is of Valencia Street in SF and which is of Williamsburg in Brooklyn? Bay Area blogger Overstated has put together his list of what New York neighborhoods correspond to which San Francisco ones. Check out his list, and let the great debates begin! Here's some calls we agree with: --Totally Williamsburg is the Mission. Last time we were on Bedford Avenue, honest to God we thought......

-The Board of Supes have their first meeting of the year with Gavin as their Very Special Guest Star. -What do you do when you can't make budget? Make welfare cuts!...

Good news! The cops caught the last week's Golden Gate Park sexual assaulter. They caught him after he unsuccessfully attempted to assault another woman in the area (but fled when her children saw him), and after he exposed himself to a number of children as well. What a creep. Shootout in the Mission -- an altercation between teenagers robbing numerous stores on Mission Street and angry Mission residents witnessing the crime spree ended in gunfire......

Who knows if animals have souls? But in weighty matters such as these, better to error on the side of caution and luckily for us in San Francisco, every year our dogs can get blessed at Assisi Animal Blessing as part of the North Beach Festival. This year you can take your critter down to National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, at 610 Vallejo St. at 2 p.m.......

Anyone else a little worn out from all this running around to rock shows? Nothing a little hot coffee and a fresh giveaway can't fix. We are so excited about the show at the Knockout this Saturday, and not just because it's walking distance from our apartment. What we're really excited about is the fact that Craig Wedren is playing. For those of you who don't recognize his name, he's the former frontman of Shudder......

Love is in the air, everywhere you look around... Nerds in love, and you know we love it. Geeks are back, baby! And if your pardner gets hilariously wonky jargon-jokes like this, you may have just found your special someone. In the "why we love The City department:" The annotated notebook Dinah Sanders lost? Found! And turning up the cute dial past eleven, congratulations to Neekole and Brandon on their first anniversary! Just to......

Add 15 cents more to your BART card -- Bernal Heights, Baja Noe Valley (what a name), and Upper Mission neighborhood advocates are trying to get BART to revive its 2002 plan to build a new station stop at 30th and Mission. Folks in the area say it's too hard for them to get to either 24th Street or Glen Park by foot, and that they think a new BART stop will help revive the area too. Revive the area? Any area that has Emmy's Spaghetti Shack, El Rio, Mitchell's, Zante's, and Goood Fricken Chicken is doing just fine in our books! BART officials say they'd love to do it, noting that the gap between 24th and Glen Park is the longest uninterrupted segment of the city's BART tracks (2 miles), but need to get the okay from the City before they start, and they'd need to get about 5000 riders at the station for it to be feasible. Check out the specs here (.pdfs). The new station would cost about $444 to $525 million to build. In other news, BART's also looking into whether they should build an extension to Jack London Square too. BART's getting it done! (Though hey guys, maybe you could also look into fixing that switching problem that gets SFist Jon so exercised?) Picture from SFCityscape.com...

Offsetting the high cost of Bay Area drinking by just skipping dinner all together (sometimes the simplest solutions are the best!), Barrespondent Drew meets another liquor dispensing establishment head on. As was mentioned a few weeks ago, our new favorite part of town is the outer Mission/ Glen Park/ Bernal Heights. Actually, that’s one of the things we’ve come to love about the area where Mission meets Valencia, its refusal to be easily categorized.......

In which SFist eats our way around the Bay Area in alphabetical order. Emmy's Spaghetti Shack, in Bernal Heights is somewhere we've wanted to try for a while. So when the time came to review a restaurant beginning with E, it seemed like the perfect excuse to head over towards the nether end of Mission Street. A work colleague who takes a kindly interest in our obsession with food wrinkled up his nose, when......

SFist interviews Dema Grim...

Here at the Office of the SFist Ombudsman, we keep charge of our readers' trust. (Stop by and we'll show you the little newspaper-lined cage we've got it in.) Thus it falls to us, when circumstances warrant, to call bullshit on one of our site contributors. And so this past weekend, following the dissolution of the first-ever SFist (Almost)-All-Staff Throwdown, we cornered the Essefficist, who spent many weeks away from his post, only to......

Call off the search engine parties. Rumors about the Essefficist's demise have been greatly smelly but largely unsubstantiated. Despite all attempts made by the beleaguered staff here at the Essefficist offices, none of us has been able to log in to Movable Type for the past six weeks, except for that one time, due to one or more of the following things: a fourteen month whirlwind trip to Paris (where we stayed in Hotel Henri......

http://www.bingwalker.com/archives/san_francisco/index.html Cancun...