Lentils for breakfast? Boozed up juice boxes for adults? Jelly bean mosaics? A wicker basket filled with TEN GRAND of fresh black truffles? Various food TV celebrities left, right and center? Yup, it's January and time for the annual Fancy Food Show at Moscone Center, with classic sweets, cheese, charcuterie, fancy teas and more, plus all kinds of new specialties. Attendance is limited to industry pros, but enjoy a few pictures here and look for some of these treats to appear on store shelves near you very soon. Lots more pictures here, too. more ›

San Francisco played host to comic convention WonderCon. It's like ComincCon, only smaller. This year's convention saw, um, colorful fans of illustrated dramas, cartoon, furry sex, and explosive imagination converge at Moscone Center. more ›

You think Hallwoeen on the Castro is a nightmare of douche-baggie proportions? Try the Oracle Open World 2007 convention, which is happening this Sunday, November 11 through Thursday, November 15. And it sucks for us plebeians. Imagine nerds and sales tools infused with a false sense of power. (Except for any Oracle SFist reader; you're all golden.) Imagine nasty Oracle PR bitches who hangup on local media outlets trying to get a modicum of... more ›

-- Tease-O-Rama Meet 'N' Greet: Before the sluts of the weekend-long burlesque convention Tease-O-Rama have you sporting erections via cheeky performances, come meet them for an intimate night of, um, conversation. Also, '60s, '70s, and '80s will flood the dance floor care of the California Kid. Starts at 9 p.m. at Rickshaw Stop; $5. more ›

The premiere offerings tonight are limited, with the 8 p.m. return of "Beauty and the Geek" on the CW being the only new show in the line-up. The show maintains its "hot girls, geeky guys" convention once again this season, but they will be adding one geeky girl and one hot guy to the "social experiment" this time around. That's right, this isn't a dating show, although there have been hook-ups in the past. Instead, the geeks try to expand the girls' minds, while the girls try to help the geeks up their game. Ha ha ha! Look how dumb the girls are! Ho ho ho! Look how socially inept the geeks are! Lather, and repeat. We have no idea if any of the geeks or beauties hail from the Bay Area, as their bios don't give out that info, but we hope so, because the reality TV locals pickings are slim this season! more ›

We at the Gothamist network would like to express our heartfelt wishes to the people of Minnesota in the days after their tragic bridge collapse. We're not trying to discount the severity of the accident by making note of it in opposition to our usual -Ist lightheartedness - we just wanted to take a moment and recognize those affected last week. more ›

. Plays start at 9:30, have a lunch break, and start again at 3 and go probably until 9 or so? The performance, at the Project Artaud Theater (450 Florida, x 17th and Mariposa) is free and probably oversubscribed, but you should stop by and see if you can get yourself in. more ›

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is a showpiece for a virtuoso of the keyboard, one with enough guts to tackle its challenges, and enough confidence to laugh at its difficult twists. Yefim Bronfman displayed more than guts and confidence, he showed some serious chutzpah. He impressed us last year in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and renewed our awe Thursday night at Davies Symphony Hall with as solid a performance. He even got an extra brownie point for tongue-in-cheek creativity. more ›

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In the taunting words of non-progressive Pat Murphy: do it, Lumpy! We stopped by the Progressive Convention where basically, on a schedule running about 90 minutes behind, everyone who's anyone in local politics stopped by and, after some exciting build-up in the form of a campaign speech by Ross Mirkarimi..... -- no one ended up deciding to run against Gavin Newsom. As Calitics puts it: Exasperating. more ›

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: more ›

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Well, you could either go to Carnaval this weekend -- or you could go to the State Green Party Convention. Ross Mirkarimi (seen here going into the dunk tank) is giving the keynote address, and the delegates plan to debate issues like ranked-choice voting, lowering the voting age to 17, and immigration. They may also get to issues about global warming. The convention starts at 11:30 a.m., goes through the Memorial Day weekend and is mostly at the State Building at 455 Golden Gate (x Larkin), though if you make it through all the sessions, they're doing a hike in Muir Woods on Monday. You have to pay to go, but the cost is, mysteriously, not listed on the website. more ›

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Chris Daly's super excited about his Progressive Convention on Saturday June 2, right? He's telling everyone! He even crashed Gavin Newsom's party last Saturday to tell him! June 2! June 2! They're going to nominate a progressive mayoral candidate on June 2! more ›

The Alternative Press Expo is this Saturday and Sunday, and hot damn we're psyched. Who better to help kick off our celebration of alternative press than one of the guys doing comics right? Larry Young is a fixture at APE -- his company, AiT/Planet Lar has been presenting there for years, exhibiting a diverse and interesting line of OGNs ("Original Graphic Novels") and other comic books. We spoke to Mr. Young about his company and pending projects. more ›

We're tired. The kind of tired you can only get from walking a trade show floor. If you've never been to a trade show imagine a mall full of things you actually want to buy, things you just need to have. And just when you think your feet are ready to give out, your over stimulated brain gives them one last push to walk the never ending floor. This is how we felt last night when we got a sneak peak at the Bead Expo, one of the largest consumer bead shows in the country- right in our backyard for the entire weekend at the Oakland Convention Center. We settled on a fine loot of vintage beads, pearls, chain so cheap we don't know how we only bought a yard's worth, tons of charms and lots of beads we know we don't really need but couldn't pass up for the price. We had wholesaler badges, but it didn't seem to matter at most booths, except for the one where we were told some wire we were looking at was $64 a spool but then when our badge was seen the price went down to $32, we didn't need wire that badly. If you are a wholesaler you can buy in large quantities and get a great discount at the show, but the public is also welcome and the prices are still great. more ›

Poor Gavin. He goes on a little trip back east and his girlfriend posts on some blog and creates a major ruckus. Then everywhere he goes, tourist officials say bad things about his city. Like there's too much panhandling and prostitutes. Not to mention dirty. And expensive. Oh, and our convention facilities are not so hot but who cares about that? more ›

There's a move afoot to move up the date of the California Primary from June, where it is now, to February. The reason for it is because by the time California has it's primary, the whole thing has pretty much been settled. We've been in California for a long time and the only time we could remember having much in the way of a say in things was 2000 when thanks to the open primary rule, you could actually vote for McCain just to get your first chance of voting against Bush. more ›

A reader attending the Oracle OpenWorld convention, who wants to be credited as "someone who's there," passed along these pictures of the scene under the tents on Howard Street. Yes, people, they closed off your city block so attendees could eat roast beef and fried chicken in wax-lined paper boxes in peace. The Howard Street tent apparently seats "thousands." Keep their conventioneering stomachs in mind as you get diverted onto Mission Street, everyone! more ›

to the success of their Oracle OpenWorld convention that they entirely shut down Howard Street between Third and Fourth to traffic, because they need the space for their caterers. You're going to make caterers make canapes on the street, Larry Ellison? more ›

Has all our elections coverage on the 'Fist gotten your progressive fire up? Do you want to meet Chris Daly and (possibly) Matt Gonzalez? Do you maybe just want to hear some jazz on a Saturday afternoon? Well, grab your Noam Chomsky book and head on out to St. Mary's Cathedral (1111 Gough at Geary) this Saturday, Sept. 30 for an all-day convention of the SF Peoples' Organization (9 a.m. - 5 p.m.). more ›

We're thinking there is no one in the Chronicle offices this afternoon, as they all seem to have raced over to the grand opening of the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall. Check out these amazing pictures that they're taking! more ›

The good news is that the first battle in the legal fight against the NSA's wiretapping program has been won by everyone who doesn't work for the NSA. The bad news is that internet-enabled vigilante mobs could be the next big fad here in the States. Eh, we're too busy applying a new Dasani-branded profile treatment to our MySpace profile and checking out some of the videos. more ›

Gleefully recommended to us by Isotope, "Conan and the Songs of the Dead," by Joe Landsdale and Timothy Truman, is exactly what it looks like, and what we eagerly hoped it would be: the sort of zero-budget b-movie 80s cheese that you might find on an independent UHF station while flipping through channels in an Des Moines hotel room at 2 in the morning. A gruff warrior with ridiculous musculature slices up zombies and beds luscious women while in search of magical artifacts. And sweetening the pulpy plot is tasty intense dialogue like "speak SENSE, girl -- or whatever you are," and "damn the dead. They are always trouble." The awesomeness quotient is so high, only dogs can hear it. more ›

a tooth-grindingly good job making lemonade out of lemons for the write-up. Tooth-grindingly good! Also, we are tres into the "Best Meta" award, which goes to Aardvark Books, who will now have to take down their homemade "Never Been Voted Best Anything" sign. And congrats to the SFPartyParty, who won Best Fighters For Your Right To Party. We'll see you guys at the Best of the Bay shindig! Other highlights of this week's issue: they also point out that last week's SF Weekly and EBX cover articles were the same. SFist Eve's horoscope: your blog will win best local blog this week! We made it up -- but it's true! more ›

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddie for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bids Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has some suggestions to fix that. They're also throwing Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash. more ›

We were going to blame our missed post on Hurricane, Tropical Storm, Summer Shower Albert, but you see how that went, so we have to level with you. We were in Orlando last week on business, holed up in another convention center, this time without a laptop. We were supposed to be sharing one with someone from work, but if you've ever had to do that, or if you've ever had siblings, you know how well the sharing thing goes with something as valuable as that. ˙In any event, this absence meant that when we went to visit all our lovely SF blogs, well. . . there were quite a few. So, in the spirit of misanthropy towards all of blogdom and its never-ending torrent of text, our first link this week will be to le blog exuberance. Then, after we've ended poverty, we'll need somewhere to go to unwind. May we suggest the Santa Cruz mountains? And then, rested and refreshed, we're back into blogging. more ›

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