According to a Valleywag tipster: FYI - I've heard the word from my peeps over at Yahoo Search Marketing in Burbank CA that the layoffs are going down as we speak, and people are being let go today. They're apparently walking the people into a meeting room, and then walking them out of the building. And according to an SFist tipster: [Layoffs will] occur over the next few days as employees are sent packing.......

Put on your party hats, folks. SF won yet another No. 1 spot to come-look-at-and-eat-interesting-stuff. This time the honor arrives care of Conde Nast Traveller magazine's annual Readers' Choice Awards. Yay. Sure, the only-in-SF tourism industry is an important part of our economy, or whatever. And not that we're complaining -- we have won the top spot for 17 of the past 18 years -- but these types of accolades make us feel that......

Tomorrow BART celebrates 35 years of hauling your asses around. Revenue service began on 9/11 in 1972. Since then, according to BART Board President Lynette Sweet, BART has continued to "carry the Bay Area through good times and bad...[w]e were there to keep the economy moving when the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake knocked out the Bay Bridge, and most recently when the MacArthur Maze connector collapsed." But most important of all, BART has also......

Hey, everyone -- once again, it's your contributions that have put the sheen on the apple that is SFist. Check out your editors' picks for Top 5 comments of the week -- and enjoy!...

Looking to do some crafty shopping or have something you've been making that you want to share with the world? Here are a few ways to get your fix. Modern Times, one of our favorite independent bookstores in the city, will be hosting their first ever craft fair in August and there's still time to register to sell your crafty goods. For up to the minute registration forms and info check out their myspace page. When: August 11th Noon-8pm Registration deadline: August 1st We've already told you how much we love the SF Craft Mafia, meet them for yourself and do some crafting with them on August 12th at Stitch Lounge. The event will feature DIY activities, including jewelry making, clothing customization, and cupcake makeovers. ...

It's always interesting to take an "outside-in" look at our fine city, like when the L.A. Times wrote about the Haight a couple months back. This time, it's the venerable UK-based Economist that's examining our seven-by-seven, in an article entitled "City in a bottle: The strange half-recovery of California's prettiest city."...

What do Broken Social Scene and Peaches both have in common? Leslie Feist! The Canadian singer-songwriter performs at the Fillmore tonight with Grizzly Bear. 1805 Geary St., SF. If you can't score tickets to the show, head over to Bottom of the Hill and check out NOMO, an Afro-beat band from Detroit for $10. 1233 17th St, SF. Calling all PSP fans! Head over to the Sony Playstation store at the Metreon to celebrate......

So those stories out there saying the commute this morning wasn't so bad didn’t quite tell the whole story . Turns out there were some problem spots out there, just not throughout the entire maze and a blogger reports that BART was a lot more crowded than it was yesterday. ...

We been noticing a lot of these kinds of accidents lately, with a small SUV rolling over at what must be fairly low speeds. We happened upon this scene this afternoon at McAllister and Webster, seeing the tow truck driver almost done with his job of righting the Honda. We have no details, although it appears as if it was a very survivable accident. This vehicle is typical of the newer style cute-utes in......

SFist interviews Artis Mark Mulroney...

We checked our e-mail this morning and saw that OH MY GOD we got an e-mail from Gavin! And what does the Gavster say? That there's much more to governing than "making our government more effective, our economy stronger, our city more tolerant, and our lives a little easier." And what, pray tell, is that? Listening. ...

According to a new poll of 500 residents, everyone is feelin' alright about the city. Or at least the 56% of them who said that the city is "on the right track." That's better than the 33% who said that in 2003. The poll says it comes from people's confidence in the economy (41%) and the performance of the Gavster, who is still clocking in at a little over 70% approval ratings. Boy, considering Gavin's past few months, he's gotta be feeling pretty good about things. Like, he's gotta be thinking that at this point he could get caught having coke-infueled threesomes with Japanese midgets and still have high approval ratings. ...

First up: Anyone remember that oil refinery fire at the Chevron plant? Back in January, a crude oil unit at the Richmond Chevron plant went up in flames around 5 in the morning. Not too worry -- the official word from Chevron is that it was no biggie. Everything’s a-ok. ...

Man, we thought we'd be able to get through a week without any sort of Gavin bombshell, but we were wrong. As the saying goes, everytime we think we're out, he pulls us back in. So today there's a big story about Ruby Rippey-Tourk taking a paid ten-week leave of absence maybe illegally, maybe not. Basically, the time off given to her was not commiserate with the amount of time she worked. Now, employees down in city hall are allowed to give their sick time to somebody if they really, really need it and supposedly, Ruby's fellow coworkers donated their time to her. The question, of course, is whether or not they did it out of the kindness of their own hearts or whether Gavin asked them to while making all sorts of hints about how they should really, really donate their time. The Bay Guardian is reporting that the time off was requested by her husband, Alex and that her coworkers wanted to help out. Fog City, however, says that her coworkers weren't very down with it all. The other thing is that the money she was given was much more than normally allowed. ...

It's always a funny thing in California in that it's good when it rains despite the fact that everyone hates when it rains. Take this winter. We haven't had that much rain and there's been all this worry about their not being enough water for our reservoirs and Tahoe's economy and dear God, it's the beginning of the global warming end! But on the other hand, we don't think there's many of you who've been thinking to themselves "gosh darnit, I really miss a good rainstorm. Why can't it rain more?"...

You didn't think the purchase of the armory by Kink.com would go through without a hitch would you? After all, the thing had stood vacant for thirty-six years and was the site of countless protests whenever somebody broached the idea of turning it into something. But after neighbors complained about not getting enough public input into the deal, from somewhere in Switzerland, Gavin asked the Planning Commission to hold some more public hearings on the matter. The hope, as Sam Ruiz, the executive director of Mission Neighborhood Centers, put it, is "to have a dialogue" about all of this and if we were playing that Project Drinking Connect drinking game, we'd be drinking right now. ...

Oh, who cares about news when the title of the NEXT HARRY POTTER BOOK HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED. OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! WE'RE SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All right, enough of that. ...

-Berkeley joins in on the Stadium fun. -Dems already start in with in-fighting: Pelosi backs John Murtha over Steny Hoyer. What kind of name is Steny anyways? ...

Please welcome a new Arts & Events correspondent, Karen S. This review is from a Paul Mooney show a little over a week ago, but we're sure you'll agree that it's well worth the wait. Paul Mooney is an Evil Comic Genius. He's evil, because he can coax out hysterical giggles from people who, outside of his presence, would never even think to laugh about the subjects he discusses with glee, precision and even cruelty -- racism, the "N" word, white privilege, that Mormon girl who was kidnapped and held captive for two years half-a-block from her home and Jennifer Aniston's horse-faced ugliness. ...

Trying to figure out what your house is worth in today's real estate market is only slightly less difficult than practicing haruspicy to predict what will happen next week. Articles like JFN6OzQPpdZZs_20061011.html?mod=mktw">the one that appeared in today's Wall Street Journal can only add to that uneasy feeling in the guts of anyone who was counting on their improving equity to bail them out of their adjustable-rate mortgage. According to the research firm Moody's Economy.com, homeowners......

We're off to the Off market Theater (965 Mission Street) for the final performance of local bad boy Harmon Leon's The Infiltrator Goes USA. For only 10 bucks, you, too, can witness this "brand spanking new show with brand spanking new videos and tales!!!!!!" -Harmon gets booked on a Christian talk show, posing as a guy who fronts a Christian speed-metal band. -Harmon joins a civilian vigilante group of senior citizens called the Minuteman Project......

Bust out the Kangol Caps, drawstring pants, and Bell Biv Devoe concert tees Raiders fans as the Silver & Black continue with their love affair with Back in the Day as they signed the one and only Jeff George. Yep, that Jeff George. George, in a way, makes a perfect Raider-- he's old, he's got a rocket for an arm, and he's dumb as dirt. Which is why he's become a running joke over the years: the dude was majorly talented yet majorly douche-y....

We've held out this long, and we're only gonna make this jokes once, but this summer, watch out for... Drinks on a plane! (We'll now run across the street and demand of the priest an appropriately harsh prescription for penance.) But don't worry, technology and, to a lesser extent, the Bush and Blair administrations, are here to protect you. With biometric terrorist detectors, other tech that's been around for generations, and the latest in arbitrary......

And for those people feeling smug about all those people who were stranded on BART this morning (not that it would be us, of course), here's something to make you feel smug back. According to a new study, traffic congestion increased by 9% over the past year, the biggest jump in congestion since 2000. Traffic congestion had decreased over the past few years due to the sucky economy, but now that the economy is somewhat (somewhat) better, it's getting worse again. It's still not as bad as it was back in the day, when it took us days to get from the city to the Peninsula and the smog from the exhaust fumes caused darkness to fall sometime in the mid afternoon and acid rain burned our skins, but it's getting there. ...

We saw MTT conduct Mahler's Symphony No. 8 on Saturday, and ran into him again the day after -- he was the composer of the music for the first half of Joe Goode's new show, and Sunday was the first night his schedule let him attend Stay Together, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The music he wrote is actually the opposite of the work he conducted the night before: it is pretty......

Mahler's Symphony No. 8 concludes with the Choir singing Goethe's words, amongst which: "All that is impermanent is merely a symbol. Here the unattainable becomes real. The indescribable - here it is done." Attempting to describe last Saturday's performance, the verses resonate with us even more: it was a visceral experience to attend the performance, one for which the words fail us. The indescribable, there it was done. The music, as impermanent a fleeting moment......

Being a relatively recent gratuate to cable from rabbit ears, we're not sure how that whole In Demand thing works, but we've been tempted to figure it out ever since we heard about Friend of SFist Harmon Leon's stint on "Juiced", a hidden camera prank show starring OJ Simpson. That's right, Harmon and OJ, sharing the screen. In Harmon's words: Some (let’s call them the sane) would be apprehensive to work with OJ. But......

We were feeling pretty good about the state of the California housing market after reading the PDF of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's most recent report. Housing prices up 18.8% in the Pacific region! California's housing appreciation up 21.07% over the year-ago period and 4.65% over the previous financial quarter! The Oakland area ranked as number 44 out of 275 urban markets in terms of price appreciation -- East Bay represent! (Silicon Valley......

The Wall Street Journal's East Bay Journal showed us a little love this week with a two-part series on the residential and commercial real estate markets in the Five-and-Dime. See "East Bay: More Affordable, But Only Compared to Its Neighbors" (January 18, 2006) and "California's East Bay Area Offers Relative Bargains" (January 19, 2006). SFist is always interested to read about bargains in the area, if only because they're rarer than a morning when......

With the economy getting better (we'll leave a discussion as to whether the economy is that good or not to others because we barely passed Macro Economics), it means more money for the state coffers. And with more money going to the state coffers, Herr Governator has more money to spend. So he made a decision as to what do to with it-- give it to the UC and CSU system so that schools don't have to raise fees this year. The schools were all set to raise fees by 8% for undergrads, 10% for grad students. ...