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......

Oh is it a voting day or something? It totally sneaked up on us! It still feels like Monday today. Actually it also feels like October. Anyway, you should probably vote yes on A and no on H, because that's what everyone else is doing. Prop A will protect The Mt Soledad National War Memorial and do something to the air force? and will transform some colleges. Also, Aristotle endorsed it it. Proposition H......

The Washington Blade tell us that an Italian physician claims that bisexuality is on the rise. No, not because female admissions are up at colleges, or because coke use among male emo-hipsters is at an all-time high. Dr. Umberto Veronesi, "prominent Italian physician," thinks that: ...sexual intercourse is becoming less about reproduction and more about affection. He said that shift could, within three generations, cause more people to identify as bisexual. Activists and bisexuals......

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked......

Hey, everyone loves a list, right? Especially those ranking institutions of higher learning. The yearly U.S. News & World Report list is out -- any wagers on how local schools did? And, really, how much would it affect your choices? We remember mulling the 1991 list saying "can't get in there, can't get in there, nope, not there either . . ." But it's still fun to see how stuff measures up, we suppose. Unshockingly, Stanford University was high on the list, reaching No. 4 this year, undoubtedly driving the next generation of Azia Kims....

So, yesterday morning we had a rare two hours to kill – the S.O. was out playing tennis and nothing good was happening on the BB live feeds. Why not head over to Bernal and get that mani/pedi we’ve been meaning to get for the last two months? We got in the car and headed over to our favorite, most reliable salon, where the instruments are clean, the prices can’t be beat, and there’s......

The problems with Oakland's University Preparatory Charter Academy (or "Uprep") are mounting, with an anonymous teacher leaking papers to the Chron today that indicated possible grade-changing on official transcripts sent with college application papers. For instance, the teacher gave one student Fs and Ds on his/her work, the report card that went home had Ds and Cs, and the transcript that went to the colleges showed only As and Bs. Teachers also noticed that the......

Coming in at a respectable number two, Forbes Magazine named San Francisco the second best spot to park your yuppie ass. As if you didn’t already know that. (Although we’re puzzled at the hair-pulling about this reality by many in SF; liberal/progressive and yuppie lifestyles are not mutually exclusive. Not by the longest shot.) Forbes based their survey on factors such as “tracking where graduates from top universities relocated to after colleges…locations of the......

Last week's winner: the SJ Metro . Cover article: San Jose Pride - family day in the park on Saturday, Gay Rodeo, Women's Music Festival this weekend. A new queer nightclub in downtown San Jo. Problems with contracting for paratransit at Santa Clara County Transit VTA . Annalee Newitz on notableness on Wikipedia. The Ann Arbor Film Festival at Foothill College. And now for our frontrunner, the SF Weekly, big trouble at the Culinary Academy......

And the Bay Area dominates your reality TV scene YET AGAIN!!! Danville's own Evan O'Dorney, sponsored by the proud-as-punch Contra Costa Times, wins this year's spelling bee on the word "serrefine," which is not a brand of drinking water but rather, is a small set of forceps used for clamping blood vessels. O'Dorney is home-schooled (but affiliated with a local charter school, and takes classes at various local community colleges), came in fifth in the......

The Stanford Daily swings into Day 2 of its wall-to-wall coverage coverage about Azia Kim, the fake Stanford student. This story is AWESOME. Today's article reveals that Azia Kim's friends from high school all thought she was going to one of those community colleges that feeds into Berkeley, but when she came back at Christmas break and said she'd gotten into Stanford, everyone believed her. While Kim's grades and extracurriculars weren't great, everyone figured she......

Okay, here's something that we've always wondered about in football-- why don’t coaches in the final minutes of a football let the other team score to get the ball back instead of letting the other team run down the clock and kick the game-winning field goal? Just look at the Eagles/Giants game. The Eagles were in easy field goal range with about two minutes to go and the Giants out of time outs. So the Eagles just ran the clock out and won the game with a last second field goal, something that was pretty much inevitable. So what if instead of doing what they did, the Giants let Westbrook run it in for a TD with a minute or so left so they could get the ball back? Wouldn’t that make more sense than hoping that some sort of fluke play occurs? If you were a coach, would you rather take your chances hoping that the team that's driving either screws up the field goal, fumbles, or gets backed up due to penalties or would you rather take a chance with your offense scoring again? ...

-Frank Gore and Larry Allen from the 49ers and Raiders DE Derrick Burgess get an all expenses paid trip to Hawaii for the Pro Bowl. The Raiders are stunned only Burgess is going. Hmmm....maybe not being one of the worst teams in NFL history would have helped. ...

Pacers 108 Warriors 106: In detailing the game, the Chron's Janny Hu actually uses the word "upset" to describe the Warriors loss. Now when was the last time those words have ever been said about a Warriors loss? Probably sometime last century. In this game, Al Harrington (who Chris Mullin tried to get in the off-season) sunk a last second three pointer to lead the Pacers over Golden State. ...

Sharks 2 Blues 0- the Sharks good early run continues on as they shut out the St. Louis Blues. It's their second shutout in a row and their third straight win. It's also their third win in five of its past six games and nine of its past eleven games. Not too shabby. ...

Let's meet the guys newly selected to bear the Silver And Black, shall we? * Picked round 7, pick 47; 455 overall / Kevin McMahan / WR / Maine / 6'2" / 196 / "Mr. Irrelevant" * Picked round 7, pick 6; 214 overall / Chris Morris / C / Michigan State / 6'4" / 305 / "The Heady Snapper" * Picked round 6, pick 7; 176 overall / Kevin Boothe / OL / Cornell / 6'4" / 327 / "The Ivy League Hotelier" ...

Note to the remaining teams in the 2006 Women's NCAA Championship basketball tournament: beware the number three seed Stanford Cardinal. ...

On Monday, local activists submitted the 15,000 signatures needed to put the measure "College Not Combat" onto the ballots in November. The "groundbreaking" resolution calls for San Francisco schools and colleges to forbid military recruiters from talking to students and possibly convincing them to exercise their freedom of choice by choosing the military. Anti-War activists are claiming that part of the reason for the initiative is that in facing low recruitment numbers, the military has resorted to lying and bullying people into joining. Which is a bit on the cheesy side. On the other hand, our college promised us a fulfilling career and high paying jobs and, well, now we write blurbs for SFist during lunch break as the only way to get any creative fulfillment. ...

Screw Christmas, today just might be the most magical time of the year 'cause it's March Madness time. We may have no clue as to who is going to win, but we do know that the next couple of weeks will definitely feature several last minute game-winning shots, shocking upsets by colleges we've never heard of, and office pools being won by elderly secretaries over basketball fans who claim to know everything there is to know about Wisconsin-Milwaukee. How big is the NCAA Tournament? Between time spent pondering office pools, constant checking of internet sites, and sick days, businesses claim that March Madness costs business 1.4B in lost productivity. Throw in the fact that the first day of the Tourney also happens to coincede with St. Patrick's day and well, SFist has been laying the groundwork to calling in sick by "coughing" as much as possible and whining about how bad we feel to whomever asked how we were doing....

It's the Big Game this weekend! Guess who's not excited about it? ...

SFist is shocked to see that we failed for the 31st year in a row to make the Forbes list of the top 400 richest people in the world. Much like those US News and World Report stickers that show up on local editions of the America's Top Colleges magazines ("NORTHERN CALIFORNIA! Berkeley, Stanford, and Mills are represented in here!"), someone has thoughtfully compiled a compendium of California-based information for your perusal....