We were a little perturbed to learn there was a local on the new season of "Big Brother," not because we weren't planning on watching every damn minute--believe us, we were--but because that's a lot of show to recap. Let's see how that local did, shall we? The guy's name is Brian Hart, he was in the Air Force, and he's in telecommunications, which is to say, he sells cell phones. His introduction showed him......

We were out running this morning, and caught a weird site cruising up Masonic. A bright red Toyota Prius with what looked like a conning tower on top. We followed it for nearly a block, and deduced that the four megaphone-like things on top were actually cameras. Our only conclusion - those crazy kids at Google are street-level mapping again! Have you seen the mutant Prius today? Where? And what funny/ridiculous/outrageous behavior do you think......

Are you an "outgoing, intriguing, competitive" person who is "up for anything and everything?" Also, are you an asshole? Yes? Then head over to Sugar Cafe (679 Sutter) this Saturday night from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. to tryout for a spot as one of the hamsters in CBS's phenomenal reality show, Big Brother. The show is simply horrifying, wonderful, frustrating, epic, and seems to end much too soon every year. In case you're......

LA-based comedy troupe The Vacationeers fears Google Maps Street View Big Brother-ness. And ever since we saw a shot of our bedroom window on it, featuring our awful interior decor, so do we. [Source: Valleywag]......

Choppy footage: San Francisco Police Department via the Chron And speaking of cameras... While Chicago has seen crime rates plummet to their lowest numbers in over four decades due to the windy city's Big Brother program, San Francisco's attempt at panopticon-ish camera security is failing. Ever since the 68 city-funded cameras started rolling, our city's surveillance program has resulted in a single arrest. That was over 19 months ago. Why the lag, you ask?......

From your SFist editor's district supervisor's blog: A day before the polls open, local reporters already started writing their Election winners and losers stories. While I won’t make any big predictions, I am confident in calling this season the biggest win for me… Saturday morning at 5:51, Grace Eolen blessed us with her arrival. Sarah had a brief but exciting labor and mother, baby, and proud big brother are doing great. Oh wow, she's......

Wonkette did something we find most awesome: commenter-cleansing. Hee: Oh, hi everybody. A lot of comments have been fun & good & whatever, but a lot of comments have also been painful to read, lately. We need to cull the herd, as it were, and we need your help. Please nominate commenters you want removed from the gene pool, which is closed for cleaning. Thanks and sorry! Never forget, indeed. Of course, as fun......

Exhibition football is back and ready to ruin our prime time lives. Hey, thanks, football. Tomorrow's a big one, so we thought we'd be helpful and give you one full day to make sure your DVR is set to record shows like Big Brother and CSI at their temporary graveyard-shift times. This is all on KPIX tomorrow (8/30), kids. If you're excited about the big game between the 49ers and the Chargers, that all......

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked......

The Sacramento-based chapter of the National Organization of Women is targeting Big Brother's resident "rocker" and asshole, Evel Dick. NOW has issued an alert asking the public to send letters of protest to CBS about Dick’s abusive behavior in the Big Brother house. NOW is responding to Dick’s tirades against Jen from a few weeks ago. Dick showered a mélange of offensive words at Jen, including, but not limited to; bitch, cunt, whore, and crusty......

We can only hope that every single news outlet has printed a typo when reporting the amount of cash the United States is sending Peru, which is still experiencing severe aftershocks. As the death toll climbs past 500, with more than 1,500 reported injuries, the United States government has pledged a whopping $100,000 in support. Why don’t we just send America’s Player, Eric (with his oh-so-attractive pierced nipples) from Big Brother to help them......

-- Newsom bats his eyes at progressives. [BeyondChron] -- Blue Angels to be banned in SF? [Examiner] -- Islamic Center of the East Bay's recent blaze decried as an "act of terror" by local Muslim leaders. [Chron] -- Man who attacked Holocaust survivor/scholar Elie Wiesel at Westin San Francisco Market Street (formerly the Argent Hotel) apologizes. Aw. Warm fuzzies for all. [ABC 7] -- Benjamin Wachs on crime and Big Brother. No, not Big......

It's no secret that we adore -- that's right adore -- watching Big Brother, especially this season. If you're not familiar with BB, it's like this: twelve Type A personalities get locked in a house and try to win half a million dollars. They're systematically eliminated one by one via house vote, and it's all captured by dozens and dozens of cameras throughout the Big Brother house. Oh, and the best part? For the three-pluss......

Last night's innovative Chicken John/Josh Wolf Mayoral debate brought in "a dozen or so citizens," artists, and political fetishists. Even though it was on a Sunday night, anyone who cares about politics, SF, and progressiveness shouldn't have missed it. Naturally, we couldn't make it. Big Brother was on, and we're concerned about Jen and the near-physically/sexually-violent way that men in the Big Brother house have been treating her. Also, it was nomination night. But......

Here we have le Gav looking lover-ly while kicking it with some tired Ethel Merman tranny (excuse me, fabulous "Ethel Merman impersonator") in Jesse McKinley's stellar New York Times article about our personality-littered mayoral race. (And while a very interesting piece, why Rita's or Jeremy's brilliant coverage and point of views aren't mentioned is beyond any and all logic. We're just saying is all. We digress.) Almost all of the usual and self-consciously zany......

When not fending off rumors that he's been horking lines, Gavin has lately been running around proposing ideas to fix Muni, spurred on by the latest SPUR report and the Transit Effectiveness Project. ...

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

Those season premieres are trickling in, with the big gusher arriving next week. We'll try to come to you daily next week with coverage and (hopefully) some actual reviews of pilots, but for this week we offer a slightly briefer rundown. "Monday Night Football" premieres on ESPN tonight, but if you're someone who watches football, you already know this, so that's all that needs to be said about that. This being the fifth anniversary......

Oh, Gavin. Is it that hard to find love while running a major American city? Here's our mayor at the SF Opera opening with reality TV star Erin Brodie. (Brodie apparently created a minor stir by wearing a knee-length skirt at the traditionally white-tie event.) Brodie, the daughter of Niner/PGA Golfer (and former Scientologist) John Brodie, made her "fame" as a two-time winner on NBC's For Love Or Money, taking home $2 million and boyfriend......

If there's one thing we love more than passing along days-old links to non-stories, it's laughing and pointing at people on the internets getting all riled up at perceived assaults on their freedom of expression. The story is from the Infinite Loop blog on Ars Technica, complete with dramatic clip art. The human rights violation in question concerns a Dutch MacBook Pro owner who'd posted a Flickr photoset with pictures of his melted MagSafe......

The MacWorld Expo 2006 isn't due to start until the second week of January, so the Apple rumor sites are already hard at work trying to ruin the surprise. We already mentioned ThinkSecret's post about a Mac mini-based home media hub, and it's also speculating on the content delivery system that device will use. AppleInsider is claiming that the company will expand further into consumer electronics from its iPod division, including an iPod-powered boom......

Okay, we're going to have a little fun at someone's expense here, but we feel that they deserve it. Or at least, we deserve to. Because we feel rather jerked around, and were ready to ignore it, but recent events have made us feel all the more belittled. So with our viciously sharp HTML claws, we'd like to dig in to the Blog Business Summit's PR department. We wanted to cover the Blog Business......

It's been a depressing week for TV, so this time around, we're going to take a slightly different approach. We're going to tell you what not to watch... Don't watch "Big Brother 6". We got sucked into it, and we're afraid we won't be able to break away, and we don't wish this fate on anyone else. This season, the house is filled with even more vacuous pretty faces than before, and despite the......

Ever since SFist was a wee little SFist, we were always told that if you were going to make money off people driving, the thing to do is to tax them for the gas they buy. This was considered a win-win: the state makes money and it encourages people to buy fuel-efficient cars. But in this crazy, mixed up state in which we live in, the Governator is thinking about taxing driving differently, by......

Sipping our coffee and doing the morning blog rounds we stumbled on this short item in Gizmodo - it looks like the boss will finally be able to see through your lame "I'm sick and laid up in bed" excuse when in fact you're halfway to Palm Springs. How? With GPS TimeTrack technology from Mountain View's Xora Software Systems, that's how. Taking Big Brother to the next level, if you carry around a Nextel company......