We're not sure if you've noticed, but as of yesterday, the new cell phone law has gone into effect. That's right: no more talky while driving, unless you've got a hands-free device for your phone. Yesterday, while we were out, law breakers were being pulled over left and right. It's a great way for the CHP to fill up those ticket quotas. Sure, the law makes car driving "safer" but, really? Driving's boring now.......

Round 4 goes to Dennis Herrera...

Shamelessly pilfered from Valleywag, we came across this footage, above, of Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin frying cell phones at Machine Project's Fry-b-que. It seems that she likes her technology deep fried with with bacon. And bubble gum tape? This does not look healthy.......

Delay, delay, dealy in the deadly tiger case...

What's on the cell phones of those who survived the recent tiger attack? ...

They still make phone books?...

Someone in Vallejo (or San Francisco?) thinks he's freakin’ hilarious flooding 911 with crank calls. The crank caller has been using a donated cell phone, perhaps one that was donated to the homeless (why do the homeless need cell phones?), to call in fake emergencies. The man, known as “Nomar” has made around 2,000 calls to 911 since March. Calls, it seems, are made in San Francisco, but are about incidents in Vallejo. These......

We at the Gothamist network would like to express our heartfelt wishes to the people of Minnesota in the days after their tragic bridge collapse. We're not trying to discount the severity of the accident by making note of it in opposition to our usual -Ist lightheartedness - we just wanted to take a moment and recognize those affected last week. After the Minneapolis bridge collapse, Bostonist did a little research and found that Massachusetts......

What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week. Being the nation's capital, DCist felt especially proud to let freedom ring this week by exposing the really important issues, like how sad they......

--Whoa, Ed Jew! See below. Aaron Peskin told the I-Team that the FBI was searching Jew's City Hall office for "$100 bills with specific serial numbers listed." That does not sound good at all. Jew told the Chron he's being investigated for accepting $40,000 from businessmen needing permit approvals. The businessmen were trying to open Quickly stores. --Also, there's going to be massive layoffs at the Chron. Oh, we hope they're not going to......

Here's a roundup of today's news...

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like......

With it being 2007, there's a whole bunch of new laws that are either to start right now or will be slowly phased in. Some of them are big deals, some of them seem fairly obvious, and some of them make you wonder what the hell. ...

The SFPD has put out a missing persons bulletin on a local Noe Valley family, who haven't been heard from since last week. James and Kati Kim, along with their two daughters Sabine and Penelope, drove to Seattle to spend Thanksgiving with James's family. The Kims were scheduled to be in southern Oregon last Saturday night, and had called the inn where they had reserved rooms and asked for a key to be left at......

Remember that bad neighbor dude Bob Bertone in Visitacion Valley who terrorized his neighborhood with loud music, mysterious gunshots, explosions, and lots of junk in his yard? Well, his house caught on fire Wednesday when his water heater ignited a bucket of gasoline that was sitting too close by. The neighbors did a pretty good job of not looking too smirky as they were interviewed. Incidentally, Bertone ran for the Board of Supes in 2000......

There sure are a lot of fans of The Decemberists, judging by the fact that they're about to play tonight and Friday night here at the relatively giant Warfield Theater. If you haven't heard their new album The Crane Wife, we're giving you a chance to win a copy of it plus a 20"x10" lithograph signed by all 5 members of the band. We'd show you a photo of the lithograph if we had one,......

Well, on the down side, they're now charging so much for cable cars ($5) that no one wants to ride them anymore. On the up side, no one's going to be able to ride them anyways -- at least not today! Cable car service on both the Powell-Mason line and the California line are down all day after alarms went off on both lines, indicating possible damage to the cable. In separate news, the historic......

Shanghaiist probably knows a little more about China than the Chicago Sun-Times. Giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one. The city does to have a music scene. Don't even front like they don't. They also have Dorito bananas and white guys shopping for wives. What they don't have is any more tolerance for jaywalkers. Bostonist sees Boston and Somerville each whip out their art and face off. A plagiarized novel is the......

Sometimes we get burnt out on politics. Sometimes, in order to watch TV, we actually turn on the TV. Sometimes, mainly when Google on our cell phones allows us to lose a baseball trivia bet more quickly than we ever thought possible, we get a little bitter about the vast resources of information on the web. In those quiet, still moments we gravitate towards blog posts that are about nothing more than introspection and personal growth. Antics so Blonde obsesses over her tax return, while Geese gets all in aflutter about the giant hole of suck that is MySpace. Amy LeBlanc gets all blissed out at her boyfriend's birthday celebration, the same as XT. Jennifer at Mental Hijinks lovingly documents her field trip to Pixar, with some more pix over at Kimi's post. Brimful reminds us of why we were English majors and swooned over poetry with her own beautiful post and Joel writes a piece that examines the politics and emotional growth behind receiving the Advocate in a plain white plastic wrapper and makes it cut to the quick. And sometimes, we just want to be left alone.

Then, somehow, despite the rain, we're done with introspection. We want to read totally inaccurate, absolutely false writing and believe it totally. We want fiction. Yes, it's marketing, but we don't care. If it's good, it's good.

Finally, after our cleanse, we're ready to face the world again. Ready to accept Microsoft into our lives, ready to go hiking or talk politics. We're ready for literature, rain and the apocalypse. We're ready and reading for you. SFist Jacob, contributing. "Morning Clouds on Bay Bridge" by Thomas Hawk. ...

A battle has been raging behind the scenes at Wikipedia. No, it's not over copyrights or veracity or how well an article explains its premise. It's over whether or not the entry on San Francisco's Marina District should include an explanation of the term Marina Girl (and, by extension, Marina Guy). The main arguments for deletion is that it's a stereotype and that the content of the article is heavily biased against the Juicy Couture......

Here in the SFist Tech Labs, we're committed to two things: science, and our readers. So we'd never let anything like the debilitating headache we've been going through for the past 18 hours or so keep us from bringing you the links to tech news you deserve. While we read the symptoms on BBC's health page, you can follow along. Throbbing Pain Ars Technica is reporting on a new California bill that would ban......

All the tech news this week is coming from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, where the giants of the industry are assembled to play the slots, get drunk, and convince you to give them more of your money. In addition to the multitude of cell phones, MP3 players, and increasingly ginormous plasma and LCD televisions, all the giants are making a commitment to downloadable content and video on demand. The keynote announcements from......

Today we visit with an actual professional in the world of blogging, Eric Lin, who writes for Phone Scoop, the place to go for the latest and greatest news in the world of cell phones. Eric managed to carve a nice niche for himself with his mobile phone fetish when other techies we're all about PDAs, which might have helped him survive the dot-bomb in one piece. Eric has also written for Engadget and......

We ordered a $100 steak at Olivetto. Bistecca alla Fiorentina, it was described, "Niman Ranch Beef Porterhouse Steak with 'bianca di Spanga' beans and Spinach, White Truffle Butter (for two). $100" We found it a silly idea at first, something a decadent Russian mafiosi would order to celebrate scoring a contrabanded crate of Vertu cell phones; something a young Wall Street up-and-comer from the midwest would eat in a Hollywood movie to depict the......

Assuming you aren't going to the SF Weekly Music awards tonight, and that you have "$30, $50, $100 or whatever you can afford", and you feel like drinkin', you should head out to Cafe Royale for a happy hour with SFist's best-loved State Smasher Matt Gonzalez and Gary Ruskin (look out, it's a damned PDF), executive director of Commercial Alert. From 6-8 tonight you can bend elbows with our favorite runner up since Suzette......

When we agreed to open the SFist Tech Labs to the public with this column, we had visions of writing about new cell phones and PDAs and MP3 players, web applications, and all the greatest technology Silicon Valley has to offer. But all anyone wants to talk about is Google. Google, Google, Google! It's enough to give us a complex (or as the hip young active company likes to describe it, a googleplex). Not......

Oh man, is this rich. Eric over at Rangelife recounts the following tale of impassioned activism against the evil movie studios who are scared shitless that someone might make a crappy copy of their crappy movie at a preview screening, downsample it until it fits on a CD and looks and sounds even crappier, and then share it with others over the internet at a "War of the Worlds" screening: Granted, we were all......

The only reason we haven't been out to see Batman Begins (besides the fact that Katie Holmes is really starting to freak us out) is because we hate big, rowdy crowds. Any recommendations on where we can see this movie without ringing cell phones, encouragement shouted from the crowd, and with decent sound and projection? If so, please please share with us in the comments. In any case, Londonist Mike has our backs with......

Complaining about cell phones..what's next, airplane food? We know. But this really pisses us off. We've been a loyal (if "fear of change" counts as "loyal") Cingular customer since 1999, if you can believe it. We're currently on our third phone, and it's time to make another upgrade. Fun! Last Friday, we went to the Cingular store (an actual Cingular location, not one of those kinda shady vendorships) at 701 Market Street (at 3rd......

When SFist was in junior high we went with some friends to a movie at the Roxie one day after school. We can't remember what the movie was, but we do remember that for some reason one friend had her pet snake with her. She kept the snake in a pillow case under her seat, and wouldn't you know it, when the film was over the pillow case was there, but the snake wasn't.......