Tonight, witness a variety of glorified dry-humping moves, taste a plethora of spirits crafted by local "boozeries", or watch French cinema while partaking in wine and conversation.
SFist Tonight, 3/27: Air Sex Championships
Are You The Next 'Rainbow Honor Walk' Design Competition Winner?
San Francisco announced the 20 recipients of the upcoming Rainbow Honor Walk installation — think Hollywood Walk of Fame, only vastly more important — last year. The installation wil stretch from the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy on 19th Street at Diamond down to Castro, continuing up to Market and along 18th Street and over near the LGBT Center at Octavia Boulevard. But they need someone to create a superb design to compliment the honor and people it commemorate. Might that someone be you?
SF Food Wars Makes War Tasty with Their Great Salsa Championchip
For us, nothing is more Californian than Mexican food. So I was very excited to attend The Great Salsa Championchip hosted by SF Food Wars this last Sunday. The competition is a partnership between Food Wars and CUESA to showcase some of SF's best salsa makers.
SFist Tonight, 8/15: Talking Taiko, Whiskey Waxing Beard And Mustache Competition, Slim's Pop-up
MUSIC: Yoshi's brings together poetry and music at Talking Taiko, celebrating the release of Yuri Kageyama's The New and Selected Yuri Writing From Peeling Till Now, and featuring guest poet Ishmael Reed, accompanied by taiko drumming. (8 p.m., Yoshi's San Francisco, 1330 Fillmore Street)
Pork Competition Cochon 555 Returns This Sunday
This year's annual bacchanalia of pork and wine, Cochon 555, rears its savory head on Sunday, June 5. Will you be there? Well, you should. "Officially, the event is all about promoting heritage pig breeds and blah blah blah, but clearly for most, it's a chance for indulging their unadulterated pork passions and eat a lot of bacon," explains Grub Street.
SFist Tonight: Countess Katya Cabaret, Bike From Work Party, and Good Magazine's Good Design SF Competition
CABARET: It's opening night of The Countess Katya Smirnoff-Skyy's Katya Takes You Home, a comedic romp around the world with "San Francisco's favorite Russian countess opera diva turned Macy's cosmetic counter lady," who has "enthralled Bay area audiences for years with her unique blend of opera, pop, and booze." The show runs through the 22nd. (8 p.m., The Jewish Theater, 470 Florida Street)
Unwrap Those Slices: 2nd Annual Norcal Grilled Cheese Invitational
Since the economy is down the bidet, now more than every before folks are getting by and a few slices of American Cheese and buttered bread set to a sizzling, non-stick pan. So this year's Grilled Cheese Invitational promises to be its most creative yet.
San Francisco Rubik's Cube Competition Results
SF Weekly is positively livid this morning that local media outlets previewed the 2009 Rubik's Cube Competition, but failed to publish said competition's esults. And SFist is one of them. (Stupid inauguration!) So, in an effort to provide you with thorough Rubik's Cube coverage, and to atone for our mistake(s), here are the main winners from last Sunday's '80s puzzle showdown.
To Do: San Francisco Open 2009 Rubik's Cube Competition, Sunday
Puzzle fans and '80s fanatics, listen up. On Sunday the San Francisco Open 2009 Rubik's Cube Competition goes down at the Exploratorium. The competition is open to competitors of all skill levels, and anyone who knows how to solve a cube (i..e, match up all the pretty colors) is encouraged to attend, compete. But even if you can't solve the famed puzzle, you should still stop by and watch as competitors try breaking world records.
Death Match: "Thriller" Record-Breakers vs. Antiwar Protestors
In addition to the "Thriller" dance record-breaking attempt at Dolores Park, Saturday's Antiwar march, starting at Civic Center at 11 a.m., will end up smack-dab at the same recreational area. Once there, the "Fall Out Against the War" marchers (another worldwide event happening on the same day) will stage a (symbolic) die-in "to bring home the 2 million Iraqis who have died, the 500,000 who are now refugees, and the nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers who have died for an occupation that only benefits weapons manufacturers and oil corporations."
SFist Tonight
-- Tastes of the City: Help raise money for the George Mark Children's House in San Leandro by attending this culinary bash. Young and "philanthropic-minded" guys and gals meet and mingle while binge eating on food and wine from such places as Andalu, Jack Falstaff, and more. Goes from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; $60. (!)
Going Down (And Bringing A Camera)
Underwater photographers of all skill levels are invited to the annual California Beach Dive Photo Competition (or CBDPC if you like tongue-twisters). For a $60 entry fee, aspiring Zissous can dive in, spend a day snapping undersea pix, and then return for dinner and prize-giving at night. The only catch: it's in Monterey.
SFIAFF: Air Guitar Nation
Long-time readers of SFist will know that we love (love!) all things Air Guitar, both for its obvious silliness and its devotion to the rawk. So when we heard that Air Guitar Nation was playing at the San Francisco Independent Asian Film Festival, we knew we were destined to see it. How was it? Well, we’ll describe it using the one word we heard other people describe it-- awesome.
Surf's Almost Up
We might be not so happy with the weather these days but there are groups of people who are. Like skiers and snowboarders. Or surfers. Surfers are especially stoked these days because all this weather can only mean one thing-- it's time for the Mavericks Surf Competition. The moment one giant swell appears, the call will go out and within 24 hours, the Mavericks competition will go out. Seriously here-- apparently all the surfers who are going to compete are ready to drop whatever they're doing and get to the surf within 24 hours of the first major swells. It's like their wives are pregnant or something. We wonder if they all have their pagers going or some sort of automatic e-mail is generated. Or maybe the Surf Signal is flashed up in the sky. They even call this period the "Mavericks Wait Period." We see that the contest has a sponsor, but how soon will it be before the wait period has one?
Across The -ist Network
Torontoist immediately wins our heart by using the word "Jackass" in a headline. In fact, we love their use of it so much that we're going to use it as much as possible throughout this post. For example, it looks like there are Toronto-area jackasses besides those who misuse the sidewalk: look at the crap on sale on Toronto's craigslist. But it looks like Toronto doesn't contain the kind of jackasses who pee in public pools, as the issue never came up when they interviewed the creators of art installations in their public wading pools.
Reversal Of Fortune
Ain't no better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than by watching the Coney Island Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Competition: our buddies at the mothership Gothamist even liveblogged the whole thing! (yes, yes, it's terrible that Americans waste so much food when people in Africa are starving. We promise to give money to Jeffrey Sachs's End of Poverty program to atone for our rapacious delight today, okay?)
And what's our local connection? Second-place eater and up-and-coming American star Joey Chestnut, who almost dunk-and-swallowed top dog Takeru Kobayashi out of first place with a strong start out the gate. Chestnut's a San Jose State engineering student! Yay Area whut!
Alas, Chestnut started to flag about 6 minutes in, allowing Kobayashi to peristalsis his way back up to the top at the end. A nail-biter, to be sure -- but now Chestnut's claiming some malfeasance might have occurred -- at around dog 50, people noticed that Kobayashi might have suffered what the eating competition circuit delicately terms a "reversal of fortune," which is an automatic DQ from the competition. Witnesses say that Kobayashi spit up into a cup, but that he (warning, it's gross) swallowed it back down before it hit the table -- which doesn't count. Chestnut's decided to view it as a bad refereeing call, and promises to be back again next year.
This summer, Chestnut's training regimen included drinking 2 gallons of warm water every morning to stretch his stomach; eating 40 dogs a day 3 days a week, and the day before he left for New York, he ate 54 dogs in a practice run. We may be betraying our Bay Area affiliation here, but we're hoping they were Rosamunde dogs.
Picture from the Chron by Laura Morton.
Cube Scouts
Someone call ESPN2, because we've found the next new hot nerd-sport craze -- the Exploratorium is hosting the 2006 International Rubik's Cube Competition this Saturday! As the calendar announcement proudly states, "In past years, many world records have been set at such tournaments including the 3x3x3 cube single solve (11.75 seconds), the one-handed solve (23.76 seconds), and the blindfold solve (1:58:32)." We're not entirely sure why the event lasts from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. if everyone's going to solve the cube blindfolded in less than two minutes, but they seem to have had fun last year.
Anyone can enter for the price of museum admission, but do note that you'll be going up against such cube luminaries as:
Jessica Fridrich, the creator of the most popular speed cubing system, the Fridrich Method; Lars Petrus, 4th-place finisher in the 1982 Rubik's Cube World Championships representing Sweden; Shotaro Makisumi, a 14-year-old freshman from Japan attending high school in Pasadena and number one in the world of the 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube, average solve at 14.52 seconds; and Tyson Mao, holder of the blind solve record at 1: 58:32.We assume it's considered cheating to peel the stickers off and repaste them on the denuded squares in color order (which is our standard method of Rubik's Cube solving).
Kamau's Going to Yuk It Up Like It's His Birthday
The Genie, and others.
When The Lights Go Down In The City
"Because tonight, tonight, tonight - oh. Gonna make it right, tonight, tonight, tonight - oh." In the immortal words of Phil Collins, we're referring to our SFist shindig down at Milk, which everyone within the sight of these words should be attending tonight. Because the Iron and Wine show at Slim's is sold out anyway, you aren't a big enough old school GNR fan to see Adler's Appetite at Pound SF, and you're dying to find out if us SFists are as toothsome in person as our clever words make us out to be. Afterwards, you can stay at Milk for the Future Primitive Sound event with D Sharp, Derrick D, Similak Chyld and special guests or you could head down to Popscene to check out West Indian Girl and Phoenix, who have a happy French pop thing going on, not unlike Tahiti 80.
Proposition It II - Election Boogaloo
Previously on Proposition It, we learned how Proposition 65 begat Proposition 1A, how Prop 60 begat Prop 60A and Prop. 62. We also learned that there’s a really cranky lawyer in Mountain View. In today’s installment, we take on frivolous lawsuits, unique tax schemes, and hi-tech gadgetry. Not to mention those crazy Indian Gambling bills.

