Just moments ago, in a letter to its members, the WGA announced that writers have voted by a 92.5% margin to lift the “restraining order” and officially end the strike. The move comes on Day 100 of the labor dispute.

WGA president Patric Verrone is expected to hold a press conference in just a few moments at the WGA Theatre in Beverly Hills, where members voted this afternoon.

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week!

Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market challenge. Wilco also played Millennium Park under a picture perfect late-summer evening. The one-year anniversary of Macy's taking over and re-naming Marshall Field's was marked by protests outside the store. They also took a look at the rotten egg the Bears laid in San Diego. Finally, the story of a Loop panhandler whose dog was stolen was enough to sheath the claws of even the site's most negative readers, if only for a few moments.

Londonist delved into past, present and future. They went back 300 years as they explored the dingy cellars of royal wine merchant Berry Bros and Rudd, then welcomed aged rockers Led Zeppelin and Brian Wilson to town. In the present, they attended a talk by Naomi Klein, author of controversial exposé The Shock Doctrine, and lamented the fact that London is now the most expensive city in the world for eating out. Looking to the future, a team of scientists recommends banning all cars from central London by 2030.

LAist must be doing something right if the Beverly Hills Police Department is serving them with a search warrant after a controversial bicycle post. Even later that week, Denis Leary and Jay Leno went off on how they hate the bicycles on the road (but love motorbikes). Other celeb news included a visit to the red carpet of MTV's VMA Awards, an interview with Carol Channing and the audio of Kathy Griffin telling Jesus to suck it. In non-celebrity news, but equally as important, they caught up with artist Florencia Pita of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and took photos of a girl being hung by hooks in her skin.

Gasp!

After 11 hard, long years of phallic rule by Tom Margro -- who left to head the toll operation in Orange County, so let's all say a prayer for him -- our new BART chief, Dorothy Dugger, is the first-ever female to hold the position. We think that this might be a good thing, a woman in the lead position. No reason as to why we think so, other than our love of sweeping generalizations based off a person's sex.

The "board voted 6-3 to put Dorothy Dugger in charge of the regional agency," claims the Chronicle. Beverly Scott, general manager of the Sacramento Regional Transit District, was the other candidate for the job, but blew it after the swimsuit competition, or whatever.

Anyway, congratulations, Dorothy.

is a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the fun and frustrations of radical feminist politics, and an affectionate exploration of its inherent hypocrisies. Whether it's adorable baby dykes who have no clue about women's history, erstwhile state-smashers mooching off their girlfriends for cash, older feminists refusing to listen to younger ones, or the questionable situation where the far-left turns into the far-right, pretty much every intra-feminist debate gets some time on the silver screen, in an awkwardly-charming story about a sweet 18 year old girl's feminist awakening. Like we said, CRINGE!

Don't worry, he's still dead. But the deceased Bible salesman's ghost drifted through the minds of a few characters at SF State's graduation last weekend, startling an out-of-towner named, for real, Earl Clampett.

Apparently one of the graduation speakers had a few unkind words for the Reverend -- himself a bottomless pit of unkind words -- and that rubbed Earl the wrong way. So in his column on World Net Daily, a trustworthy and insightful news website, he frowns about the graduation speaker's "lack of tolerance and common decency" before loading up the truck and driving back to Beverly (Hills, that is).

The article itself's just a bunch of , and about as self-congratulatory and impenetrable as a post on Indybay. Yawn. Hopefully things'll get interesting in the form of an elevated discourse in the Digg comments.

Lots of sports today

Warriors 120 Blazers 98- Okay, let's put this in perspective, the last time the Warriors made the playoffs was thirteen years ago. This is what the world was like back then:

Shannon Doherty was about to be kicked off "Beverly Hills 90210"
"Real World San Francisco" aired
Pulp Fiction was released
Biggie and Tupac were still alive and Kurt Cobain was alive for everything but the tail end of the season
People were into Ace of Base
Netscape Navigator was introduced
OJ got into his buddies' Bronco and all hell broke lose.

Man, those were good times.

Sharks 3 Predators 2- The Sharks took a 3-1 lead in the first round of the playoffs with one of those games were everything was in sync. They attacked on offense, banged some heads, and had great goaltending to win their second game in a row. In the game, Milan Michalek scored two goals and Nabokov made twenty-three saves to get the win.

Baseball after the jump

Please excuse us. We need to take issue with an article, "French roast brews, sip for sip" in today's Los Angeles Times.

Why were we reading the L.A. Times, you ask? We're secretly Angelino-philes (that's why we poke fun at them sometimes).

We happened upon the above-linked piece and, being your Trimethyldioxypurist, thought we should weigh in on the flawed methodology, the lack of transparency in tasting method, and, perhaps most of all, we wanted to take up for our friends at Graffeo, whose dark roast is described in the article as having "chocolate aromas and a soft finish," but being "rather flat."

Okay, Graffeo may have a Beverly Hills location, but that's a San Francisco company you're messing with, L.A. Times. We're calling bullcrap on this whole "review piece."

First of all, much like SFist Mary Ladd's excellent point about Bill Addison's over-taqueria-ing in the Chron a little while ago, you're not being fair to any of the sampled products by tasting 13 of them at once. This is hogwash. Coffee is complex, and those complexities are often subtle; would you lend any credibility to a similar article tasting 13 types of Zinfandel in one sitting? We don't think so.

Second beef: The article says the coffees were "all brewed identically in French presses." Any true coffeephile knows that flavor profiles of different beans/brands/blends are optimized differently, even if all purport to be "French Roast." An additional or reduced volume of ground coffee, a hotter or cooler brew temperature, more or less steep time, a slightly coarser or finer grind -- slight differences in any of these factors could highlight one or two of these 13 products and mask the finer qualities of many of the others. Would you prepare every type of heirloom tomato the same way? No! French Roast is just a ; an important designation that, however, does not make it okay to prepare the same way across the board.

Having garlic infused drinks, garlic spread on your bread, garlic appetizer, garlic entree and garlic ice cream: we fancy all these once in a while. But stringing all these into a meal sounds to us more like fraternity hazing than gastronomy. If there was a Gimmicks Gone Overboard series, it would be episode one. They say "Follow your nose, to the stinking rose." We add: you'll have a garlic overdose. Man, you stink, turn on the hose. I see that you are bulbose, but it ain't me that you arose. That smell makes me comatose. Take that stench away, or I'll get bellicose.

So we were actually delighted to receive the Stinking Rose Restaurant Cookbook: we don't have to be a sourpuss raining on the garlic parade of patrons of the restaurant, we can now cook one garlicky dish as part of a meal, and put onions in our gibson instead of garlic cloves, and be perfectly happy. A clove a day to keep the doctor away, that's all we need.

Yeah, San Francisco's nice, we guess. But you know what it REALLY needs? Parking garages. Yeah, get rid of that stupid Yerba Buena garden, and that useless Golden Gate Park, and that , smelly Mission. We're sick of coffee shops, park benches, covenience stores, murals, and jerks like Supervisor Daly (who's sponsoring legislation that would prevent construction of free-standing parking garages in SF, and limit apartment-building parking spots) who are blind to the unadorned beauty of a squat concrete bunker that reeks of gasoline and pigeon droppings.

The argument in favor of garages is something like, "families, businesspeople, and tourists can't get around without a car and asphalt terraces on every corner," and yes, it would suck to haul a family's-worth of groceries home on Muni. But y'know, folks sure do seem to find a way to make it work in cities like NYC and Boston and London, where we can't recall ever seeing many aboveground freestanding garages. (And have you ever tried parking in LA's Beverly Center garage? It's like friggin Labyrinth in there, complete with a Bog of Eternal Stench.)

It's hard to argue that it wouldn't be nice if fewer people drove and more people took mass transit. But Chris' measure doesn't actually improve access to busses and trains, or the dismal quality of SF transit. It just lowers drivers' quality of life to match that of bus riders'. Le sigh. Meanwhile, big-business groups like SFSOS and The Hotel Coalition are crying bloody murder over efforts to keep SF from looking like LA. It's expected to heat up in January; the supes requested that the Planning Department do a study on the whole dealio, so we can expect a lot of clamor as each side makes its case. Stay tuned!

Color of America? Red, white, blue! Color of the Giants? Orange! Color of San Francisco? Hot Pink! Wearing a Unitard! Way back when SFist self-interviewed, we shared a special San Francisco moment that has been repeated many a happy time since. Walking down the street we hear a happy chirping noise and then spot a man wearing a hot pink unitard and riding a unicycle, flapping his hands and exhorting people to be happy. Trust us, there is absolutely no better introduction for out of towners than to have a Pink Man spotting, and then to point out that no one else is even staring at him. We love this town!

We’re proud to say that we’ve finally managed to track down Pink Man! Next time you see him out pinking, you’ll know he is the friendliest unicycle rider out there. He’d probably even be willing to pose for pictures, just the thing to send to the folks back at home!

Why the Unitard?
I thought it would be a great base for a funky spaceman costume.

Why Pink?
It was the brightest color they had.

Why the Unicycle?
Why walk when you can fly?

Best interaction you've had with someone while dressed up?
So many. Uh, one night in Santa Monica a women called out "Pink Man I love you!" She gave me a nice warm, consequently embarrassing hug- (skin tight suit) and a Hundred dollar bill.

Worst interaction you've had while dressed up
Drive-by punch in the head in Beverly Hills.

Best location for riding a unicycle
Flat. 73 degrees. Friendly people.

Had a Pink Man sighting? Share it in the comments.