A recent video has emerged showing Giants' legend Juan Marichal joining current legend Pedro Martinez in a little bout of cockfighting in their native country, the Dominican Republic. Apparently, Juan's cock took on Pedro's cock and won. Way to go, Little Juan. The video of it appeared on YouTube but was recently taken down, but this being the internet, a video in some form still exists. For obvious reasons, we won't post it but for those curious about it, you can see it here (warning-- site contains pictures of excessively well-endowed women.)...

After yesterday's Raiders game in the McAfee Coliseum parking lot, a man was shot in the leg and groin (ye-ouch!) after a non-football related argument," according Alameda County Sheriff Dept. Sgt. J.D. Nelson. Read more about stupid footballian fan behavior here. (Okay, we only brought this up because we rarely have the chance to talk about football, or more to our point, the stellar show that is 49ers Press Pass With Mike Nolan. It......

-- Benefit Show Honoring Erno "Tattoo" Szabady: Local rock bands Slowfinger, DickDusters, and the Walker Brothers get together to raise money for a burial "niche" for well-known, recently deceased tattoo artist, Szabady. Show starts at 8 p.m. at Peacock Lounge, 552 Haight Street (at Fillmore); $10-$15. -- Live-in Maid (Cama adentro): Norma Aleandro's dramatic role, about a "wealthy woman and her live-in housekeeper" dealing with the economic collapse in Argentina, finally arrives in the......

-- The A’s: Oakland play at home against the Baltimore Orioles. Game starts at 7:05 p.m. at McAfee Coliseum; $9-$44. -- "Blow-Up": DJ Jefrodisiac and Emily Betty’s "indie-pop-disco-noir" (noir?) monthly dance club brings out hipsters of every ilk. But that doesn’t mean that you still can’t have a good time. Vin Sol & Morse Code, the Lovemakers (DJ set), Codebreaker, and Disco Nat make special guest appearances, and resident DJ Richie Panic and MC......

--A source passes along these pictures of Gavin Newsom and Carole Migden at a Pride event some time back. We saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus! --Steve Jobs speaks at the Apple Conference today. --They say the real estate market's cooling off -- but the average single-family home in Noe Valley went for $1.4 million in April. Curbed SF gives you the analysis. --There's a new Tales of the City book coming out tomorrow. --The Police......

-We'll say this about the Warriors-- they got some gumption. After a series of not so great games and the shellacking at the hands of the Spurs, the Warriors went out and beat the mighty Suns. They started off scoring 45 points in the first quarter and then held onto win 124-119. J-Rich scored 36 points, 24 of them on 8 three- point plays. Stephen Jackson had 29 points and Brittle Baron had 21. They......

Here's todays wrap up of the news...

There was an evacuation of trains on the Fremont and Dublin-Pleasanton BART lines after a fire at a substation knocked out power to part of the system. The fire started at about 10:15 this morning near the Coliseum stop, eventually knocking out power between the Fruitvale and San Leandro stations....

We've talked about about the BART/SFO connection a whole bunch so today we have news from the other side, the Oakland airport. We know, we know, it's scary over there, but for those who haven't ventured over to that side to fly out, it's not half bad, actually. ...

The Oakland Raiders' 2006 slog of a season continues this Sunday at the Coliseum with their Week 15 scrap with the St. Louis Rams. Plenty of good tickets still available for the game. Well, there must be tickets, since the NFL is blacking the game out on TV....

* Houston vs. Oakland Sunday, December 3, 2006. 1:15 PM, PST. Week 13 The Battle Of The Trough After losing four straight games to every team in the AFC West and one franchise that used to be in the division for good measure (@SEA; DEN; @KC; @ SD), the Raiders limp home. In uglier times early on this season before the wins versus ARI and PIT, this Week 13 game against the flailing Houston Texans had been projected as the Raiders' best chance to get a win....

So let's take a look at the news in yesterday's M&R that the A's are about to announce a huge plan to build a stadium near Fremont. Basically, they want to build a privately financed, 36,000 seat, baseball stadium near the former Baylands Racetrack on land owned by Cisco. The reasons for Fremont are obvious and well-known but for sh--- and giggles, we'll go over them again. ...

The Stones play Oakland Coliseum tonight having had to move it from last night's show due to Mick having a bad throat. Now granted, most people don't really care about the Stones anymore mainly because they've spent the past twenty years or so being the World's Greatest Rolling Stones Cover Band. But still, when they were good, they were really good. So, to get everyone in the mood for the show, or at least remind people just why they were at one point the biggest, baddest band in the land, here's a clip from their early-70's prime. It's a video of them doing "It's Only Rock n Roll" and it's somewhat live. Or at least it’s a lot grittier and dirtier than the recorded version. It's everything that is the Stones and more, somehow being both campy and bad-ass all at the same time. ...

Last night's "Battlestar Galactica" was....awesome. Just awesome. -YMCA plan to cut down trees for their Camp Jones Gulch camp near La Honda not going down well with people who live near there. ...

-On a cold, wintery afternoon that probably matched how A's fans are feeling right now, the A's went down to the Tigers 3-0 to now be down in the series 3-0. It happens every year in baseball come playoff time-- one team gets in explicably hot and can do no wrong (the '02 Angels, the '03 Marlins, the '04 and '05 Sox) and that this year is the Tigers. The A's, meanwhile, appear to be in that vicious playoff cycle in which hitting becomes almost impossible so the team presses and makes hitting even that much more impossible. Yeah, it's not over til it's over and the '04 Red Sox famously came from behind by an 0-3 margin, but.......

This afternoon beneath overcast skies at McAfee Coliseum, the 2006 Oakland Athletics continued to defy expectations by smacking the Minnesota Twins 8-3 in a fashion befitting a potential World Series team. The entire game was a literal composite of the A’s season: solid pitching, timely defense and amazing clutch hitting. ...

If you don't expect anything from life, you can't be disappointed. Monday at the Oakland Coliseum, the Raider Nation in attendance expected their Raiders to compete with the San Diego Chargers. The Nation assembled with facepaint and masks and bared teeth. Their songs of war echoed through the East Bay night air. You see, the Nation, they expected a battle. They got a slaughter. ...

This Wednesday at the Oakland Coliseum, the Golden State Warriors are holding a party for anybody interested in gathering en masse to witness the mysterious fan dance that is the Warriors on draft day.

Despite the unpleasantness of the last 12 years, Warriors fans seem jacked up about the draft, if not the Warriors Draft Party.

At least, that's how the Warriors Marketing Department sees it. Leveraging the momentum of setting the franchise single-season attendance record even while enduring another trip back to the drawing board, the team has decided to pull up their grass roots and upgrade the party venue to the mighty Coliseum. In years past, the party has been held in local watering holes such as the Hyatt Regency in Burlingame, site of last year's throwdown. The Warriors have hit the big time now though, or expect to, or want to create the impression that they have, so it's a promotion to the Big Leagues for the W's other annual endeavor in futility.

Photo of last year's Draft Party bacchanalia from the official site of the Golden State Warriors.

Aw, you know we love a good cliff rescue story. A man walking too close to the edge of the cliff in Half Moon Bay was successfully pulled up about 80 feet on Thursday afternoon. Did you hear a loud bang right after the spelling bee ended last night (around 10:20 p.m.) in the Mission? There was a major water main break at 20th and Valencia. Expect hipsters to look a bit scruffier tomorrow! And dude, don't block the box! A truck didn't manage to pull all the way through the railroad tracks by the Oakland Coliseum and got hit by an oncoming train. The driver got his rear wheels over the tracks but the back 10-15 feet were still over the tracks; he honked his horn but the person in front of him couldn't move up any further. The driver was uninjured but the empty truck trailer didn't come out looking so good. Railway officials repeat their warnings that if it doesn't look like you have enough room to clear the tracks, don't cross 'em. ...

Richard Hargraves v. Clint Coronel Though last week's Golden Gloves was not actually the "Golden Gloves" event sanctioned by boxing's governing body, USA Boxing, that information failed to dissuade some of the Bay Area's greatest fighters from appearing at the Civic Center this weekend. After battling Symphony, Asian Art Museum, and fight fans for parking, we entered Bill Graham Coliseum as the Chronicle's Editor, Phil Bronstein departed (insert joke about the shifting tides of......

ESPN the Magazine (as opposed to ESPN the occasionally showing sports TV channel, ESPN the Web site, ESPN the restaurant chain, and ESPN the movie studio) recently decided to put together a poll that ranks every franchise of the Big Three sports (hockey isn't included as it wasn't playing last year). The ninety-two teams are ranked based on online survey questions and the magazines' own research and are based on things like
wins, management, fan relations, and cost. The top five franchises? The Spurs, Pistons, Steelers, Colts, and the Anahiem LA Angels. So much for sports life in the big cities. The worst five teams? The Knicks, Trail Blazers, Vikings, Bobcats (still too young of a franchise to decide) and coming in last, the poor homeless N'Awlins Saints. So how did our local teams do? In short, meh (we would link to the article in question, but for whatever reason, IT"S NOT ONLINE! This is the 21st Century-- everything should be online. We mean, we can find naked pictures of Natalee Holloway out there, but we can't find a damn ESPN article? What's up with that?) As befitting our no longer regal status in the sporting universe, most of the Bay Area teams came in somewhere in the middle with the Oakland A's deemed the best Bay Area franchise, at 42. Praise was given for it's inexpensive tickets, players (12), and value (17) but were given demerits for management (too cheap) and locale (the dumpy Coliseum, or the Stadium Al Ruined). ...

The first time we saw U2 it was 1984 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. Obviously, that was a long time ago: pre-Apple commercials, pre-hanging out with politicians, pre-heavy-handed attempts at irony, pre-blues co-opting, pre-rock n’ roll Messiah complex. Hell, it was even before Bono leapt into the crowd at Wembley at Live Aid. It was and still is the best show we’ve ever seen. We loved U2. We bought everything they sold, put posters up......

We know, we know: It's Barry Bonds Week in Bay Area baseball. That's very exciting, but there's also a pennant race going on just across the bay from 24 Willie Mays Plaza. After Monday night's 2-0 victory in Cleveland, the A's are a game behind Los Los Angeles Angeles de Anaheim Anaheim in the AL West and 1 1/2 games behind Cleveland in the AL Wild Card race. There are only so many ways......

The A's have lost four games in a row, to the Minnesota Twins and the Baltimore Orioles. They were defeated by A's Brand Baseball's two favorite Orioles, (in order) SS Miguel Tejada and LF Eric Byrnes, and by our least favorite, overrated, lying, cheating, limp-dicked 1B/DH Rafael Palmeiro. They suffered a bad inning from Barry Zito, who sustained his first loss since June 17, on Monday, a horrible call by first-base umpire Chris Guccione......

Thanks to SFists Jackson and Eve for reading the weeklies last week! Last week's weekly of the week, as picked by you, our readers: The Guardian! Gerardo Sandoval continues his all-out media blitz, this time about Comcast (our main priority vis-a-vis Comcast is to get them to add Boomerang, the classic cartoon channel.) Where's our free wifi? A guy died in the SF jail (covered also by the Chron). Annalee Newitz on machinima (like fan fiction, but for videogame hacks). Cover: Oakland band Battleship (who get hit by firecrackers in their shows). Sonic Reducer: local bands go to a bar in LA and run into Lance Bass, Ryan Cabrera, and Courtney Love. The EBX: Bottom Feeder with an excellent Law and Order episode: a possibly-delusional woman who killed her husband, whom she met when she was a patient in his psychiatric practice, is defending herself and will be cross-examining her son. A paper targeted at the Oakland inner city and covering sex gossip, called BootyCrack! Bobblehead day at the Oakland Coliseum! Cover article: the overprescription of psychiatric drugs. And the allegedly-homophobic dancehall star Beenie Man comes to town and puts on a decent show. After the jump: the SF Weekly, and we go back to autocratically picking the weekly of the week....

Our friends and family tried to tell us, but we had to find out for ourselves anyway: July in an ivy-covered Northeastern college town is no place for a California boy. We mention this because that's where we were four summers ago, huddling by the air conditioner in a townie bar to escape the heat that had been trying to braise us, watching the A's play Cleveland on ESPN, when we discovered the best.......

In May, when the A's were busy losing twenty of twenty-four games, and trotting out starting pitchers that even A's bloggers didn't know were affiliated with the organization, we here at A's Brand Baseball were considering a change in strategery. Not "giving up on the season," exactly--more like emphasizing reasons to care about the A's that didn't involve hoping they would actually win baseball games. We'd have instituted a Rickey Watch (.302/.494/.397, 1 HR,......

In which we review a homestand, and preview the first series of a road trip to the NL East: A's third baseman Eric Chavez was named American League Player of the Week for the week ending June 5. That's pretty good under any circumstances, but even better when you consider that on Wednesday June 1, Eric Chavez was having another bad week in what has been (we hope) a forgettable first third of the......

The A's have lost 8 games in a row, and 11 of their last 12. The A's are 9 games below .500. The A's have been outscored, in 2005, by every team in the American League and by every team in the National League. National League teams only have 8 hitters in their lineups, to American League teams' 9. The A's expected Rich Harden to turn into Tim Hudson this season, but this isn't......

Dear Oakland A’s, We get it. We understand that the team’s philosophy is very, very complicated, and involves math. It is not just about putting together a bunch of big, slow guys who walk a lot and then wait around for a three-run home run. Anyone who thinks it’s that simple, we know, is hella dumb. Now that we get it, could you please hit a few three-run home runs and maybe win some......