During yesterday's hotly contested Muni Cable Car Bell Ringing Contest, Leonard Oats beat frontrunners Ken Lunardi and Byron Cobb to snag the title of Best Bell Ringing MUNI Employee in the Universe. In the amature division, first place went to "Scottie B" of KOIT (we'd like to think Vanessa Williams played a small part in his victory); second place, Aaron Jones of KBLX, and third place went to Janelle Wang of ABC 7. Here are......

Here at SFist, we are not impressed with percussive instruments. Calling a drum circle "music" is like calling crosswalk stripes "a painting." But there's something sort of impressive about an experienced cable car bell-ringer, so gosh darn it we can't quite manage to fully roll our eyes at today's annual Muni Cable Car Bell Ringing Contest (noon in Union Square), at which Gavin Newsom and several local news personalities (please Jan Wahl, please Jan......

No. 25 is alive. Again. [WhatImSeeing]"OMGROFL" [Jameth]Breaking news: Danielle Steel's "glazed" Stinson Beach home for sale. [Curbed]Anti-gay marriage measure qualifies for November ballot. How creepy. [Sacbee]Perfect for all you purgers out there: French fry coated bacon on a stick. [CHOW, via Last Appetite] Photo by WhatImSeeing......

Photo by WhatImSeeing Guess what we don't want to think about while riding San Francisco's whimsical, romantic, and downright gorgeous cable cars? Unkempt sphincters.......

Did you ever wonder just where or how cable cars were made? More to the point, did you know that cable cars didn't just fall from the sky? Well, we didn't. WhatImSeeing, allowed inside the Woods Division's Cable Car carpentry shop in the Dogpatch nieghborhood, landed some spectacular shots of San Francisco cable cars in the process of being made. According to WIS, John Stenson supervises five carpenters who make up the Cable Car......

Muni issued an alert yesterday afternoon that said simply, "Emergency - Powell line cable cars back in service." Oh no! Emergency! Cable cars unleashed on an unsuspecting public! Save yourselves! Run for the hills! Oh no wait -- the hills are exactly where the cable cars WANT you to run! Okay, okay, we jest. Obviously it's just a poor choice of words, not real peril. We can't begin to guess why someone thought that......

While crews repair a damaged cable, California Street cable cars will be down for the count today, but could return to service by early tomorrow. Sad, isn't it? According to Muni spokesman Alan Siegel, "[t]he cable runs continuously (up and down the line), so we have to find the one section of the cable that's damaged ... we have to run (the cable) slowly until that section gets into the car barn." [via SFGate]......

In North Beach fights breakout and mild vandalism occurs after bars close at 2 a.m. This chaos, typical for any city, makes some of our sensitive city dwellers cranky before bedtime. Or whatever. So, the City Planning Commissioners somehow got it into their heads that closing pizza parlors on the the Broadway strip, pizzerias that normally stay open until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., before 2 a.m. will solve a slew of problems. According to the Examiner:...

Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, the day where big retail shoppers traditionally break even for the year! Traditionally considered the biggest shopping day of the year! Is it retail therapy? ....Or is it kowtowing to the gods of capitalism and binding the workers who long to be free? Well, if you're heading out to Union Square today but feel kind of guilty about it, you can at least make yourself feel a little better......

Screw the cardboard tube battle, this sounds like something that needs to happen every night. This evening at 5 p.m. sharp, head on down to the tourist epicenter of San Francisco, the Powell Cable Car turnaround, for what will be a massive pie fight. According to Mr. Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid, SF0 player Herbie Hatman is organizing a formal-attire pie fight (think Mabel Normand, Keystone Cops) which will get all up in......

Gothamist learned about the craziest urban nightmare come true: A huge python found in the bathroom pipes. It was also a nightmare for some Yankees fans, as manger Joe Torre declined to come back and manage the Bronx Bombers. At least the city's attempt to give some direction to subway riders was interesting, pranksters went shirtless at the Fifth Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch and the I Heart Brooklyn Girls calendars came out. And just......

Last night we had the opportunity to bear witness to a most common SF annoyance - cable car operators not collecting fares. Shocking? No. But, what did throw us for a loop was the brakeman, who accepted a tip. When our relative from out of town just had to ride a cable car before his departure from our superior city, we decided to indulge him and follow some tracks until we caught up a with......

We lost a geek last week, but we still had a local bachelorette to root for along with a "dream date" to our fair city on "The Bachelor"! The first group date involved clowns, and was therefore instant fast-forward fodder for us, especially since it didn't involve Sheena. Some chick named Hillary won a one-on-one date with Brad and they took a private jet to San Francisco and had a fancy dinner in a private......

Photo of protest by Filipino-American's at the Disney Store....

The Powell-Hyde Street cable car line shut down for the rest of the day today. The cable running beneath the car was "frayed," it seems. Frayed? That...sounds scary. We wonder if any cars have plummeted down one of our lovely hills due to frayed cables snapping. We hope not, but we wonder. Anyway, less aesthetically-pleasing shuttles buses will go along the route until the line reopens tomorrow.......

-- Cammerin Boyd killed by reasonable force, says jury. [Chron] -- Behold: the 54 million dollar SF home. Bow down before it, plebeians and renters! [CurbedSF] -- Argentina hosts the gay World Cup of soccer. Maricons can play sports? Well, that tears it. [Chron, via AP] -- Ed Jew fights to keep his seat on the board of supervisors. Sigh. [Examiner] -- Castro getting all atwitter over this year's Halloween. And we're all gonna die!!......

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Jerry Seinfeld was in town the other day, presumably to promote his upcoming film Bee Movie (why on a cable car, though? Is there an SF theme? You know we'll watch anything with an SF theme!) -- and our favorite photographer Drew Altizer was there on the scene. Thanks for passing the pictures along, Drew! We're hoping these end up in US Weekly's "Celebrities, they're......

We’re thrilled when our commute ends up boring rather than late or, say, riddled with crushed pedestrians and such. It turns out that this commute, well, it’s the stuff that dreams are made of: kids' fantasies. Apparently, CalTrain is so dreamy and hot that it's now a center spread in the newly released Timmy and Tammie’s Train of Thought. TTTT, for short. Other local trains featured in the book include MUNI's F-line and the......

Sigh. For those of us for whom a MUNI FastPass is not enough (i.e., with commutes outside the SF city limits), we really have been eagerly awaiting The One Card To Rule Them All Translink system, which promised to let you buy one magnetic card that would give you access to all Bay Area public transportation systems. No more fumbling around for BART tickets, or waiting in line by the cable car to buy MUNI......

There's been ANOTHER shooting in broad daylight??? Police had to race to Market Street between 5th and 6th after a drive-by shooting this afternoon. You may know this area, as it's right by the cable car turnaround we send all the tourists to, right by the San Francisco Shopping Center, and right by the Powell Street BART and MUNI stop. (And the Forever 21, of course.) Oh, that's not going to make our visitors love......

DROP EVERYTHING. Seriously, clear your calendar for this one: it's a good old fashioned bell-ringing contest! By gum, it's been a while! Well, a year. Oh, and it's happening today. You didn't have any plans, did you? Sorry this post is so last minute, but once again displaying their organization's characteristic timeliness, Muni sent out a press release at the end of the day on Wednesday, letting us know about an event on Thursday.......

Send your Bay Area finds to found [at] sfist [dot] com or tag them sfist and found on Flickr! Let us know where and when you found the item and any other helpful info. Today's find is courtesy of Greg Dewar of the fabulous N Judah Chronicles, brought to us via the SFist Found Flickr stream. We love the colors and texture in this one. The sink looks like it belongs in some big,......

This week, we're going to change things up a bit and go all History Channel on you as we explore the history of Muni Security. Next week, we'll go back to the usual responses to the various questions....

A truck filled with 60 cows tipped over in Contra Costa County yesterday. Ha! Despite our most diligent efforts, we are unable to find any pictures from the scene, so we're going with the "Cow Crossing" sign you see to your left. One person is dead after a dramatic shooting in the Sunset early Monday morning -- the shots were fired at a moving car, which then flipped over and crashed. The Chron has some......

Some fights seem really really important to the folks involved, and utterly mystifying to everyone else. You know like when you see two pigeons fighting over a hamburger bun, and you can't decide which one to root for because it seems like they both want the same thing and they'd just be better off sharing? Or another example: the unnecessary feud going on at the Cable Car Museum. Yesterday we mentioned a book by......

In today's installment of "Ask a Muni Security Guy" our security guy answers questions that commenters asked last time around. He will also discuss this week's Muni news about budget cuts and their impact on Muni security. And before we go to the post, we'd like to formally announce that "Ask a Muni Driver" will be returning next Monday as we have another driver willing to answer all your questions. As always, if you have......

There's no more dizzying story of SF history than that of our local transit. If you think it's hard to keep track of the bus routes today, just imagine trying to sort through the patchwork of agencies and name changes and battling operators that've spent the last hundred years keeping us from getting from one place to another. A bite-sized chunk of that history can be found in the new book The Key System:......

Here's todays news...

In another shocking development, it has been discovered that 40% of the people who board cable cars are not having their fares collected by conductors. Actually, this isn't that shocking considering it was discovered awhile back by Gavin Newsom, Private Dick. In another shocking part of the story, it was determined that the time and amount of crowding on a cable car can affect when and when not a conductor collects fare. ...

Stumbled across two bad ideas while walking through the Powell cable car area....