Update: It's raining. Get out your brellies, Wellies, and slickers - the rain is on its way. Meteorologists are expecting the rain to start falling this afternoon. Expect high winds and heavy rain. Flooding is a possibility and of course, everybody's favorite - power outages! Be safe on the roads (especially in the right lane on 280 South between Cesar Chavez and Alemany, where a gigantic puddle always seems to surprise drivers) and please be......

Got that parapluie? The Chron reports that the skies are going to open up starting tomorrow, with not one, not two, but three separate weather systems barreling on in from Alaska. They're expecting 2-4 inches of rain in the city, possibly up to 8 inches in the hills, and a "paralyzing" amount of snow in the Sierras. There's also the possibility of flooding, so if your house is prone to it, pick up some......

Free bike light giveaway today only. ...

-- KrOB'S Film Farm -- Faust (1994): Jan Švankmajer's version of Faust, using Goethe's and Christopher Marlowe's tales as well as heaps of surrealism, screens tonight at 8 p.m. at Chez Poulet, Cesar Chavez (Army) and Mission Streets; free. -- Minnie Driver: Why should you see her? Well, she has an Oscar nomination under her belt. Granted, it's for the XY-heavy emo-porn shitfest Good Will Hunting -- but Driver's got an Oscar nomination nonetheless.......

Well, at least he lives in the Richmond, right? (Some) affordable housing advocates and ethicists are shaking their heads over District 1 Supervisor Jake McGoldrick's poor party timing this week. Remember that lot on Cesar Chavez and Mission that everyone's fighting about condoizing? Well, the Board of Supes had a contentious debate about it on Tuesday, and narrowly voted for development on a 6-5 vote. (hey, Michela Alioto-Pier must've shown up that day!) The swing......

Rally at St Luke's Hospital in the Mission...

-- "Not guilty," says you know who. [Chron, Examiner, ABC 7] -- Beautiful, steel, and glassy Rincon Hill (and its streets) want a little love, too, you know? [RinconHillSF] -- The Cesar Chavez/Mission Street condo debate goes on (and on). SF Board of Supes decide tomorrow. [Beyond Chron] -- Crunchy New College is on accreditation probation because of "sloppiness." Whoops. [SFGate, via SFBG] -- Although we're partial to show tunes and a good five-hour......

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again: the civilly-disobedient affordable housing gang finally either climbed over or clipped open that fence at the corner of Cesar Chavez and Mission yesterday morning, bust in on the lot, and set up tents. Tents! Man, we'd love to have a tent across the street from the Palace Steak House. Twelve people were arrested as a group of about 80 protestors chanted anti-high end housing slogans. Fog......

A rally against gentrification in the Mission...

--It's June 16, which means it's Bloomsday! Commemorate the day made famous in James Joyce's Ulysses with readings from the book, music, and a special Bloomsday feast at the Mechanics' Institute. 57 Post Street (x Market), $15, saloon opens 6:30, readings begin at 7:30. --LAist Zach is coming to town as part of the CalArtsf alumni art festival: dance, spoken word, world music, animation, paintings, and lots more artistic expression at Cowell Theater and the......

As discussed in the SFist Contributes tips page, what people heard in Ingleside Heights early yesterday morning was a mysterious car explosion. Witnesses saw a man park a car, get out of the car and into someone else's, and then the parked car burst into flames. Around 7:00 a.m, another car mysteriously exploded, this time in the Tenderloin at Ellis and Taylor. The two incidents aren't thought to be related -- but how weird. Gimmi......

Pick your poison -- it's either flyering for Gavin Newsom or going to the Progressive Convention this afternoon. If politics isn't your game, here's some other options for today and tonight: --The Manga show's opened at the Asian Art Museum! Featuring the art of Astroboy! Check out the blog, and check out the show. 200 Larkin Street, $12, 10-5. --Bring a radio and come to a Southern Exposure artists' walking/radio broadcast narrative tour of 20th......

Okay, this is what we mean when we say that it's totally impossible to get reliable, useful information out of Muni. Even when they do offer up little tidbits of data, it's squirreled away and confusing and the only reasonable response is, dude, WTF? For example, did you know that "On Cesar Chavez Day, March 30, 2007, weekday non-school schedules will be in effect"? Oh, you didn't? That must be because you don't check......

Gavin Newsom was all raspy voice and bulletproof hair at last night at Cesar Chavez Elementary in the Mission. Despite somebody's command to "Go back to Nob Hill!" Gavin asserted "I'm not going away." He's used that phrase a couple times now. Is that your campaign slogan, homie? We hope not, because you're not exactly the underdog. It's almost April and you still don't have an opponent. ...

Our feelings regarding the sneaky scheduling of Gavin Newsom’s Third Fake Question Time this Monday can best be expressed through American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee’s latest single, “Over It.” The purple halter dress she wears in this video is pretty cute, too. However, just because we're over it doesn't mean we're not secretly putting together a special Fake Question Time ensemble in the hopes of running into some chick dating some dude (not to......

Man, we can't believe Team Newsom scheduled Third Fake Question Time at the last minute like that -- your Political Junkie is out on vacation so we can't make it to the Cesar Chavez Elementary School on Monday the 26th at 6 p.m. to discuss health care with the residents of District 9. (825 Shotwell (between South Van Ness and Folsom, cross street 22nd). Man, and we were hoping to see Han Shin and......

Late word: What? Gavin Newsom lied to us! At the last Fake Question Time, Gavin clearly told us that the next "town hall meeting" would be in April and address the issue of crime in District 5. So color us surprised when we start hearing word on Monday that Third Fake Question Time is going to be next Monday, March 26, at Cesar Chavez Elementary in District 9 on health care. (note: there's a......

We were listening to the traffic reports a few days ago when one of the radio announcers said that there was a problem on 280 because a naked woman was spotted walking around the highway. All the deejays laughed, of course, so the traffic guy had to say over and over again that it was a true story. And you know what? It was a true story. Even crazier, police think there might be a connection between her and the murder of a transgender person. ...

Here's todays headlines....

In a sad story, the wife of the dean of the USF School of Education was killed when a Cadillac Escalade making a U-turn hit an SUV going through the intersection. The SUV careened into two people in the intersection and then slammed up against the wall of a building, and the wife of the dean was pinned under the car. There's upsetting pictures from the scene online too. A freshman possibly on shrooms fell......

Activist film in the Mission - At El Rio (3158 Mission St. at Cesar Chavez), outside on the patio, The Heads Up Collective presents The Take, an inspiring documentary, filmed during the factory takeovers in Buenos Aires, that centers around one auto-parts factory, and of the lives and struggles of the 30 unemployed workers who decide to reoccupy, collectivize, and get it going again. This screening is part of the monthly radical film series, Televising......

A woman biking to work (with a helmet) suffered life-threatening injuries after being struck by a cement truck making an illegal right turn onto the 101 onramp at Market and Octavia Monday morning. The truck didn't stop, but a motorcycle cop subsequently caught up with the driver on 101 by the Cesar Chavez exit (and determined that the driver didn't realize he'd hit the woman). There have been a number of accidents at that intersection,......

A 69 year old women was killed today trying to walk across Geary & 25th. Witnesses said she started to cross the street as soon as the light turned green but slipped and fell as she began. A car on 25th either didn't see her or did something they shouldn't have and hit her as they turned. The driver does deserve plaudits for stopping and helping out. No charges have been filed yet....

A new report on the Department of Public Works just came out and it's pretty much not good. Kind of damning, actually. The basic gist of it as that they're spending way more money than they're taking in for not a whole lot of work. Basically, they're not cleaning up graffiti, not pruning trees, and not fixing pot holes. Of, if they are, they're spending way more money than they should in fixing them. ...

Hey, we're back from vacation! And we just missed the 5-foot sinkhole that opened up on California Street between 6th and 7th Avenues for New Year's Eve. Does anyone have pictures? In our second item of news on the city's west side, CHP and the SFPD shut down the Golden Gate Bridge to pedestrians to thwart Code Pink's peace march across the span, to commemorate the 3000th U.S. casualty in Iraq. Code Pink didn't have......

First, the swanky: The MoAD Vanguard presents Preview at the Clift Hotel, (495 Geary St. at Jones) an evening of art, music and dance for a cause - the cause being MoAD and the arts of the African Diaspora. From the PR: groove to the global sounds of DJ Cecil (Relevant Sound, Bembe) while taking in the artwork of Amanda Williams, April Banks, Rah Crawford, Rosalind McGary, Emmanuel Pratt and Sydney James. Preview is......

A 26 year old man in Mill Valley called in a bomb threat to Walgreens because he was upset about how long his prescription was taking. Unfortunately, the person who answered the phone recognized his voice and called the cops -- but not before the Walgreens was evacuated and thoroughly inspected by a police dog. That can't have sped matters along with the caller's prescription. Neville Gittens took a break from discussing the hit-and-run guy......

Anything you can do, Wednesday can do better. Tonight: The APA group Kearny Street Workshop, in conjunction with Intersection for the Arts, presents the finale to its 2006 Intergenerational Writers Labwith a reading of the works that the lab participants have been preparing throughout the year. Sounds like experimental fiction, poetry, and maybe some lyrical prose might be making an appearance (though the group is careful to say that their work "transcends genre.") $5-15, 7-9......

It's not just that you're a bad driver, folks! DPW says that over half of SF needs to be repaved and it's going to need $340 million to do it. DPW says per year, it needs $34 million just to keep up, $340 million to take care of the backlog, and that it has never gotten more than $18 million. You may remember in the last election, the city tried to get a bond passed to repair the streets, but it didn't get the 2/3rds majority it needed to pass. So now Supervisor Sean Elsbernd has proposed that the city give $28 million of the budget surplus to fix the roads and sidewalks. DPW has put together a list of streets it would like to pave immediately if it gets the extra cash: Valencia between Market and Cesar Chavez, Mission between 11th and 16th, Page between Franklin and Div, Monterey and San Jose, Quintara and 28th, Lincoln between 3rd and 28th, and Portola between Junipero Serra and Twin Peaks. Man, we were driving down Folsom today and hit a pothole so deep it made our teeth rattle. Just how bad is it on Quintara and 28th? You got any favorite pockmarked streets to complain about? ...

Ironic, that one leaving for work early in the morning to avoid traffic can end up causing it. A man driving to work in Palo Alto around 5:30 this morning slammed into the side of a 60-foot-long delivery truck on Middlefield near San Antonio. The man claims he didn't see the truck, which seems a little weird to us, because the truck had blocked three lanes of Middlefield as it was backing into the Toyota of Palo Alto lot. The guy was going under 20 mph, and wedged his 1994 Acura Legend right underneath the trailer. Fortunately, no one was injured, in part because the guy was going so slow and the car was relatively low to the ground. Up in San Francisco, the professionally-sensitive CHP have announced that a woman was found wandering in a daze by the side of 101 S near Cesar Chavez around 7:30 this morning with minor bruising and bleeding. According to the article, the woman, who was picked up at the corner of 16th and Mission, was "negotiating for some type of services" with the man, whom she reports not knowing, when they got in an argument and he pushed her out of the car near the 280/101 split. Gee, what do you think was going on there? The woman claims the car was going 60 mph, but the CHP says her injuries would have been much worse if that were true. Call 1-800-TELL-CHP if you have any information. ...man, finding the third entry is always the hardest. Um, MUNI is closing down parts of Third Street this evening as they test the electrical system for the new Third Street rail. You'll see a flash and hear some popping sounds at 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. tonight. ...