SFist Jon's away this week, so you're stuck with the former editor on your Day Around The Bay. --Robert Haaland comes clean about his vacation during the District 6 race. --Critical Mass in Walnut Creek last Friday didn't go so well. --In some kind of strange shout-out to the golden spike that connected the transcontinental railroad, a bunch of people in Palo Alto signed a wireless Internet transmitter that had been painted gold. Huh.......

Last week's winner, the East Bay Express. Rad dream cartoon this week. Feeding your pets raw meat. Are people trying to sneak into the Berkeley school system? Cover article: not sending juvies to jail. The Dixie Chicks play Oakland this Friday. The Slits are in town. A review of Xyclo -- Oakland Vietnamese restaurant, with a cool name. Old people went to the Rolling Stones show. And Tenacious D. Next up: the Bay Guardian. Nancy......

God, we're so sick of Snakes on a Plane that we want to kill anyone and everyone that makes a "something on a something" joke. But then we realized that there was no way we could ever win this fight, and, hell, if you can't beat them, we might as well join them. And with that, you have the theme of this weeks' Gothamist network post. Austinist makes it easy for us, with Candidate on......

We were stumbling around the internets yesterday and discovered that our very own Ms. Pelosi has set up a YouTube page. How with it, our Ms. Pelosi. And what will you find there? Oh, just clips of her playing soccer, lip-synching to pop hits, and ranting into a web cam whenever Tim Russert refuses to take her phone call. And boy, is her "Lazy Sunday" parody, "Lazy Appropriations", hilarious ("Lazy Appropriations start debate in the late afternoon/call Steny Hoyer just to see how he's doing/Hello? What up Stens?/Yo Pelosi what's cracking?/You thinking what I'm thinking? (Earmarks!)/Then it's happening"!). No, actually, you'll find clips of her and her peeps giving speeches on the House floor. Sadly, none of them appear to be mash ups with clips from anime cartoons. ...

LAist is flashing a sad peace out to their editor Carolyn Kellogg with one hand and bumping knuckles with their new head typist L.A. blogger king Tony Pierce with the other. Where do ist editors go when they hang up the 'editorial we'? They take on MySpace, apparently. At least Ben Brown does. Austinist reminds of the just rewards of less savory careers this week and then they witness the Arctic Monkeys and We Are......

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia -- oh, we're just the good ol' reliable Bay Area in Election 2004, no one cares about us -- no one's wooing us, no one's filling up our airwaves with "I'm George Bush and I approved this message" disclaimers, America Coming Together and Berkeley's own moveon.org aren't hosting Springsteen and Dixie Chicks concerts at the Shoreline, and no one's marketing W ketchup at our local farmers' markets. So us lovelorn political junkies are bubbling with enthusiasm over this week's triple bill -- John Edwards at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, raising $1.5 million and showing his support of the striking hotel workers, Jesse Jackson speaking at the Commonwealth Club last night, and John Ashcroft at the Tech Museum in San Jose today, ominously intoning that "Young people must learn ... of the risk of intellectual property theft." In Cleveland, Ohio or Erie, Pennsylvania, they'd probably just view that showing as pretty second-tier (and they'd be right), but for us -- wow! People actually coming here to promote national political agendas! It really must be the cheese! ...