Even with all the nasty weather, this weekend proved to be yet another violent one in San Francisco. For sure. After five shootings took place within a 24-hour time period, two people lost their lives. Let's go to the rewind, folks: Yesterday, on Rosie Lee Lane in the Bayview district, Torrance Gray, 16, was found dead of multiple gunshots wounds. SFPD were responding to a call when they found him. A few hours earlier,......

On Thursday morning, we bent our self imposed no-drinks-before-noon"guideline" and attended a fun food and wine event. What made this invite stand out was that the wine tasting, Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau 2006, was tied to an important cause, the San Francisco Food Bank. Had we known we would be able to witness and talk to a good natured young woman dressed in a gigantic Beaujolais Nouveau costume we would've RSVP'd even sooner. Oh, and did we mention we dig romantic French accordion music by Odile Lavault while we sip and nibble? ...

If we were to name our column again, we'd go with "the SFist on the table" or Get ur food on or whatever witticism we did not come up with when we settled on Gastronomique. Snacks on a plate? We'd try to convey what we attempt to do: inform and show off our camera phone food pictures and maybe squeeze in a joke here and there. We assume that restaurant owner face the same conundrum,......

Last week's winner, the SF Weekly: Letters: Pro-sex worker letter, and a letter pointing out race- and class-based disparities in local coverage of murdering moms. Matt Smith on the DeYoung parking shenanigans. Ways to avoid paying your taxes (shouldn't this article have run before taxes were due?). Videojournalist Josh Wolf gets subpoenaed by the feds over last year's anarchist riots. Cover article: SFIFF. Improv actors pick the theater critic's how-we-met story to act out on stage -- hilarious. Meredith Brody takes more relatives out to eat. She has a very large family, doesn't she, Ced? Matmos. The Bouncer's not drinking this week -- take care of yourself, Bouncer! You sound a little down. And Savage Love -- whatever you do, don't burn your youthful hijinks onto a CD-Rom, fool! Next up, the San Jose Metro: San Jose should stop embracing sprawl. The Fly: Fast food politics, with a Subway application and some political donations shenanigans by King Eggroll. There's an excellent picture of a kid slaying a dragon in the California Theater Company's production of "The Reluctant Dragon," but it's not online. Curse you, Metro! Cover article: the San Jose downtown district 3 election. The chef from Campton Place's new restaurant in Mountain View. Project Runway winner Chloe Dao is in San Jose this weekend. SFIFF. Pick out the fake hyphy-related vocabulary words from this list. And SFist Eve's horoscope: rescue a talking parrot from a burning pet store. Get on that, Eve! The EBX, the Guardian, and the pick of the week after the jump. Picture from the Weekly's Sucka Free City column....

To get us out of the house, we need more than the promise of comfort food. We have all the comfort we want at home, what with running water and in-house sanitation. We can cook up a comfort storm in our kitchen, should we want boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin or mac&fromage. We'll make exception to any rule, of course, but to get our little tushes in a seat in a restaurant, we require......

There are rumors swirling around --which will propagate and give credence to, of course, despite having absolutely no further information -- that Chef Daniel Humm could be leaving Campton Place Restaurant, just off Union square, due to some reshuffling after the acquisition of his restaurant (and the hotel which hosts it) by some LA businessmen. So just in case there is a hint of truth in this, we'll hurry and award him the first......

It is no wonder that, when stealing the word amuse-bouche from the vocabulary of French cuisine, Americans commonly take only the first part, and unceremoniously dump its trailer. The First Amendment covers the freedom to butcher the French language, we cannot let old Europe's silly traditions straight-jacket the American idiom into a convoluted and elitist language. So amuse it is. Still, some of the silly French cooking traditions find a way to creep back......

Rivers Cuomo's still got his hash pipe -- but this kid doesn't! A 21 year old in Pleasanton is recovering from 3rd and 4th degree burns to his arm, hand, and face after "a device that refines hashish into marijuana" blew up his basement bathroom's water heater. The explosion was so brief that nothing else caught on fire, but the guy's facing drug charges after he gets out of the hospital. The SFPD has identified Randall Davies as the man who flipped out in Union Square on Wednesday night. The cops saw Davies make an illegal U-, but when they followed him into an alley, he jumped out of the car, grabbed a pedestrian hostage, ran into the Campton Place Hotel, fell down in the lobby, threatened the doorman trying to help him up, and fled the scene. The police IDed Davies on some mail he'd left in the abandoned car. And an elderly woman with Alzheimer's who was reported missing from the Stonestown Nordstrom's was found a day later, hiding in a bathroom in the main mall. Extra bonus! An updated roster of all your Blotter pictures since March after the jump. ...