A small protest was held at City Hall yesterday by 400-plus pissed off Tibetan immigrants, honoring the 49th anniversary of Tibet's uprising against China, but also San Francisco's hosting of the Olympic torch. Just a preface of what will happen in the city next month, San Francisco will be the focus of a major protest since it's the only US city hosting the Olympic torch relay in the 2008 Beijing games. According to CBS......

February may well be our favorite month in San Francisco. Between the Chinese New Year parade, the glorious weather, and Noise Pop, there’s really no better place to be this time of year. Noise Pop officially kicks off tonight. To celebrate we’re reposting an interview with the man behind it all, Kevin Arnold, that we originally ran last year.......

Photo credit: sniderscion Torontoist spent its week uncovering who was behind mysterious ads for a drug called "Obay" that popped up across the country (Scientology? Frank Shepard Fairey?), first tracing them to an advocacy group called Colleges Ontario and then confirming their suspicions a few days later.Phillyist learned how to put on a puppet show – it's not as easy as you might think!Shanghaiist discovers that the average starting monthly pay for fresh graduates......

The Chinese New year parade for the year of the rat, 2008...

Good grief, this Chinese New Year business sure does go on for a long time. This weekend, it's a New Year Parade and a New Year Community Fair that'll be tying up traffic. A ton of major east-west lines will be affected on Saturday afternoon -- the 5, the 71, the 38, the F, the 1, and so on. Also causing trouble: the weather. Muni can barely keep its head above water when it's dry,......

Is there anyplace in San Francisco more charming than SOMA at night? No, there is not. And this President's Day, it'll be even charminger: construction and traffic reroutes on the Bay Bridge may cause a few heavy-flow days over the holiday weekend. If you're clever, you'll probably want to avoid SOMA in the late-night and early-morning hours. But then again, if you're clever, you probably already do. But it's not all blocked onramps and......

Wow, it feels like just yesterday that we posted something about the Symphony's Chinese New Year's concert for last year's Year of the Pig! Well, it's now the Year of the Rat, and the orchestra's raring to go! Last year's 14 year old solo pianist, Peng Peng, is now 15 and this year, he'll be playing a Mozart piano duet with 13-year-old up and comer Conrad Tao. The orchestra will again be helmed by Carolyn......

SFist worried over drugstore chain Walgreens celebration of Black History Month.Gothamist was surprised that apparently New York City is the fourth most miserable city in the country, after Detroit, Stockton, CA, and Flint, MI.Shanghaiist finds out what the Chinese think of Hilary and Obama.It was with a healthy amount of schadenfreude that Phillyist reported that former Eagle, and now Cowboy (ew), Terrell Owens owes the Eagles a significant wad of cash.Torontoist is two weeks......

Muni has three disruptions on their radar this weekend: The Chinese Flower Market Fair on Saturday and Sunday, the San Francisco Half Marathon on Sunday, and the Tet Fesitval Celebration on Sunday. All three sound scrumptious, even though only two of them are explicitly Asian. After the jump: details! Yummy delicious details.......

We've seen these ads on buses and at Muni stations as of late. Although we were tempted to bash this new queer men's dating service as an eHarmony for sodomites... eh. Valentine's Day approaches. Have at it, lonely hearts. Chinese orphan babies for everyone! Image credit: Omega it's jameth......

The food section round up is back. We gobble the various food sections up each Wednesday. But first: ready to "dine and go to heaven" in San Francisco? We are! Dine About Town is here, and prix fixe dining heaven costs $21.95 for lunch and $31.95 for dinner. Participating restaurants include: A16, B44, Cafe de la Presse, La Provence and others. This heaven won't qualify as a cheap eat, but it's presumably cheaper than what......

That's a picture taken by reader Angela of a counter-protest sign at the June 07 Ed Jew rally that says "RESIGN" in Chinese. Well, Angela -- that day is nigh: City Attorney Dennis Herrera takes a break from infuriating the ACLU, the NRA, and Mark Geragos to announce that he's holding a press conference at 1 p.m. where Ed Jew is expected to resign from the Board of Supes. Ed's resignation is in response......

Torontoist discovered their city's most ridiculous holiday lights setup, with 80,000 lights and two––two!––synchronized music routines. Naturally, they snagged a video. Chicago tragically loses one of its most recognizable neighborhood icons, the pigeon man of Lincoln Square. LAPD leaves body in car at crash scene, then tows it. Massachusetts plus mullet equals PR mayhem. Londonist sleeps in a Haunted plague pit. UC Berkeley students strip naked and race through campus, NSFW floppiness ensues. Phillyist......

Sorry for the day late post, but it was a hectic weekend, and we just couldn't bear having to recount the tragedy that was this week's "Project Runway" without at least one good night's sleep behind us. Let's get this over with. Last week's pathetic challenge still hung in the air this week with the designers discussing Carmen's exit, and Chris proposing a "Project Runway" fragrance that would be a mixture of tears, sweat,......

Weep no more, my lady. After handing over an apology to the sobbing mother of a Chinese journalist that they helped imprison, Yahoo now must hand over an undisclosed amount to the scribes. Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao, the latter a former journalist at Contemporary Business News, will receive a hefty, unknown amount from Yahoo, Inc. The Chinese journalists sued Yahoo, blaming them for their imprisonment and torture by Chinese government officials. "According to......

Fun Fun Fun Fest 2007 Recap from Super!Alright! on Vimeo. Austinist attended a town hall meeting about proposed noise ordinances that could undermine the city's future as the Live Music Capital of the World, and lamented the possible loss of Texas's only feminist bookstore. Throughout the week, they interviewed a bunch of indie fashion designers and D-I-Y websites—Etsy, Ornamental Things, 31 Corn Lane, and Aorta Designs—for the upcoming Stitch Fashion Show. They also did......

Okay, we're not exactly sure how this works, but it's...bizarre. Seems that a trio of scammers are preying upon the elderly Chinese American community in SF (no, not Ed Jew). What's interesting is their technique. See, a woman and two men approach their victim, telling them that they look sick. One of the suspects then "fills a teacup with water and invites the victim to stick a finger in the cup, explaining that it......

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos threw down some serious shade today. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," he cried, shaming two senior Yahoo officials. Why? Because the Sunnyvale company named names, handing over private information about Chinese journalist Shi Tao's online pro-democracy action to country officials. (Or, as the New York Times so eloquently put it, their "complicity with an oppressive communist regime." Oh snap.) This landed......

Last week's winner, the Bay Guardian. Tim Redmond says the Navy is the gayest armed services branch. Well, sure. Cars are worse than homeless people, says a letter writer. Halloween will suuuuuck. A former director of Intersection for the Arts died in a car crash. The new crackdown on homelessness, and why aren't people more upset? Cover article: Our pals at SwapSF make the cover! About the whole freetail trend! Yay SwapSF! (and other freegans!)......

We're back from our inadvertent hiatus -- here's hoping it's a less busy week for us at the day job and an even more busy week for Ed Jew news! Fang qi means resign in Chinese, and that seems to be what everyone's calling for, with Gavin Newsom now, with "grim determination," trying to figure out how exactly to get Ed Jew out of office and pick someone else to fill the seat, now that......

When you live in a neighborhood overrun by donut purveyors and nail shops, with a fair number of fairly unappetizing Chinese restaurants sprinkled in between, the arrival of a new joint featuring a new regional cuisine is cause for at least a little salivation. In the Grand Lake district, we now have a Flavors of India restaurant, second outpost -- the first opened in Rockridge in 2006. It's not great Indian food. We'll be......

Ann Sherry's North Beach mural "Gold Mountain," a work that depicts Chinese influence to San Francisco and American history, fell victim to hooligan defacing. Specifically, the recent addition of Betty Ong, a San Francisco flight attendant who died in the World Trade Center attacks. While it doesn't seem like an intentional hit on Ong's heroism, 9/11-ness, or whatever -- because murals in this city get defaced the second the paint starts drying -- it is......

San Rafael-based Edutopia Magazine, which is brought to us by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, looks to the future in its latest issue, identifying 10 ideas or trends that its experts believe can improve K-12 education. We found them thought provoking, and hope you agree. ...

Well, that was fun. Last night out in the center-left bleachers, each time Barry Bonds came to bat, the crowd rose giddily to their feet. The stands brimmed with grins and shouts of encouragement and nervous energy. Mitts were pulled on. With each pitch thrown to him, photoflashes flared all about the stadium like Chinese New Year firecrackers....

The way Wired's Noah Shachtman sees things struck us as astonishingly clear and pragmatic in reference to the Lawrence Livermore lab's partnership with Texas A&M....

Our sister site over in Shanghai notified us to this. Sure, on the surface it seems like a viral, isn't-that-darling clip of a Chinese man executing a well-choreographed tribute to "U Can't Touch This" by Oakland native MC Hammer. But the underlying theme here is a heartbreaking one of a young man craving a scrap of affection from a frosty and heartless mother whose only concern is that of her gauge. Watch it and......

A photo of Iraq war opponents Sean Penn and Carol Migden...

To celebrate 07/07/07, local modern Japanese theater troupe Theater of Yugen is presenting The Cycle Plays, an all-day festival of pieces influenced by Japanese Noh theater traditions. The performances use Noh theater conventions and imagery but present stories about figures of American pop cultural legend -- so there's a piece about Ted Kaczynski, a play about Helen Keller (pictured at right), and an adaptation of A Long Day's Journey Into Night. Plays start at 9:30,......

Passes! Passes! We got movie passes! Wanna see Eve and the Fire Horse, a movie about a high-spirited Asian-Canadian girl whose older sister is going through a Christian religious conversion, and whose family is learning to assimilate in Vancouver? (The "fire horse" part of the title refers to a superstition in Chinese astrology that children born in 1978 are particularly rambunctious.) We have no idea what's going on in that picture above, but it......

As we were waiting to pick up our lunch today at the excellent Chinese food place across the street from our office at the to-go table, we were idly flipping through this month's issue of Costco Connection magazine, the in-house publication of everyone's favorite roast chicken/toilet paper/gigantic muffin supplier, that they had lying around. Well, how surprised were we to see, nestled in among the articles about Kirkland brand disposable diapers (page 61, they're now......