Once again, SF is in the news as being a hot spot for bed bugs, but luckily we remain well below the metropolises of New York, Chicago, DC, and Baltimore — the latter now holding the number one spot according to an annual report by pest-control company Orkin. The SF Bay Area — here defined as the metro areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose combined — now ranks 10th on the national list of bed-buggiest places, up four spots from last year (though we were also #10 on this list from USA Today back in 2011). And this is based just on Orkin's internal data of the number of service calls they've performed in each city.

Baltimore has bumped up nine places on the list, and nearby DC has bumped up one spot to be second in the country, meaning that general part of the country is the hottest of beg bug hotspots right now. (Cue everybody who just flew back from Baltimore/DC for the holidays frantically checking their luggage zipper seams.) Meanwhile New York is holding steady in fourth place, and Chicago has dropped down from #1 in 2015 to #3.

Back in 2012, Supervisor Jane Kim declared herself SF's bed bug warrior, penning an ordinance that clarifies tenants' and landlords' responsibilities in dealing with bed bug infestations, and requiring landlords to disclose any bed bug abatement measures or infestation histories going back two years. But in the four years since, if we're still #10 in the nation and up four spots from last year, maybe that's not helping?

As NBC Bay Area reports, the problem is far from a local one, and "As a whole, the nation witnessed a hike in bed bug sightings and reports during 2016."

But perhaps it's time to get super paranoid and read over the EPA's guide to finding and dealing with bed bugs. It should be noted — and this should keep you up at night! — "Bites on the skin are a poor indicator of a bed bug infestation. ... [and] some people do not react to bed bug bites at all."

Go check your mattress seams, sheets, luggage, headboards, etc. for tiny dark dots or crawly insects the size of an apple seed. And be forewarned, they sometimes travel by BART.

[Gross. Ack. Please god no.]

Previously: Beware Of Bed Bugs On BART

“I had made a promise to myself [that] I would sleep with the trophy that night,” Warriors majority owner and former managing partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers Joe Lacob tells Haute Living in a harrowing account picked up by Deadspin.

Of the trophy earned by his NBA championship-winning Golden State Warriors, Lacob indeed tells the world that “Nicole [Curran, his longtime fiancée] and I did sleep with it.”

Oh dear. When pressed, gently, on the issue, Lacob, who is 59 years old, responded that “I’ll leave it to the imagination... We had a lot of fun with it.”

Haute Living characterizes the episode, perhaps cheekily, as a ménage à trois. Are we to take this to mean that Lacob and his trophy are on Thrinder, then?

Previously: The Dubsack: We. Are. The Champions

Another restaurant fails to heed the warnings of the Health Department, and suffers their wrath: Sliderbar, the just-ok, two-year-old slider restaurant in the old Bagdad Cafe space at Market and 16th, suddenly finds itself closed today with a notice on the door.

As the Castro Bubble reports, the notice does not specify exactly what was wrong on their most recent inspection, but they were clearly cited multiple times and did not take the necessary steps to solve their problems, and now they are closed. Their most recent food safety score, back in March, was 92.

This of course sucks for Sliderbar since their big-screen TVs have been quite popular throughout the baseball postseason, and tonight is the big Game 3.

In some cases of these Health Department closures, restaurants are able to get reinspected and reopen within 24 or 48 hours. But stay tuned.

Update: Castro Bubble got the Health Department to respond, and the situation appears to be a cockroach one. The restaurant remained closed for a cleanup all weekend. Stay tuned to see if they get reinspected and get to reopen.

A transient San Francisco woman, nicknamed "Rat Girl" by Animal Care & Control due to her fondness for the rodents, is accused of breeding a small horde of rats and releasing them in local parks.

According to Animal Care & Control, the 43-year-old woman, also known as "Erica J.," used to breed rats in her room in an SRO on Minna Street, where she lived in 2011. Her colony eventually numbered over a thousand before the Public Health Department had to be called in to exterminate and Animal Care & Control actually started to become concerned for Erica's mental health.

In the intervening three years, Erica has been in and out of housing and living on the streets. At one point she had rats living with her on a cart underneath the Japantown pedestrian bridge. Most recently, Erica has been living in the mini-park at Golden Gate Avenue and Steiner Street, where she would feed her rodent friends dog food out of a bowl. When she was reported to Animal Care and Control, the responding officer found that the eight or so rodents she had with her had taken up residence of their own in the park.

"The officer that responded noted that they had been there for some time. They had actually sort of dug a maze and had areas to tunnel and burrow," Animal Care & Control Captain Denise Bongiovanni told KTVU. "We collected seven, unfortunately I believe one of them was really sick and died in transport. We impounded the rest."

Surprisingly, some of Erica's brood have even been adopted by the AC&C, but Bongiovanni says Erica can get very attached to them and has been known to hide them if she believes they'll be taken from her. Although she has been reported by everyone from her social worker to landlords to local residents, Erica is apparently hard to track down and the compassionate folks at Animal Control are reluctant to have her prosecuted under the municipal code, hoping instead that she will find the mental health treatment she needs.

KTVU has more:

Previously: 'Waterfall Full Of Rats' Plague SoMa, Your Dreams
Central Subway Rat Army Now Invading North Beach
All rat coverage on SFist

Prepare to be grossed out if you've ever walked by UN Plaza on particularly blustery day: our local FOX affiliate is peering deep into the plaza's abyss after one student from the Art Institute of California claims he got a severe eye infection from the water spraying out of the plaza's fountain.

Jakob Kuhlman tells KTVU that he was walking by the plaza last month when strong winds blew water into his face, which is a gross enough fate on its own. Days later, Kuhlman had a puffy, red eye. Doctors at Oakland's VA Hospital told him it was infected and put him on antibiotics before sending him on his way to becoming the subject of a local news story.

Although Kuhlman can't prove the fountain water was the culprit, KTVU asked around the Department of Public Works to find out just what kind of stuff ends up in the UN Plaza fountain. According to DPW spokeswoman Rachel Gordon, the fountain is cleaned once a week and disinfected with chlorine and bromide, but there are still a startling number of used needles ending up in the drainage below all that misty spray: "We have found anywhere from several dozen to maybe three dozen on a monthly basis," Gordon told KTVU. "We have a filter and they collect in that filter."

As for the water itself, a city inspector found the levels of disinfectant to be "comparable to what is required in swimming pools and spas," which is somewhat reassuring, but we'd still recommend double- or triple-washing any produce you pick up at Heart of the City Farmers Market.

[KTVU]

Whole Foods clerk and maggot whistleblower Marc Melancon tells a horrifying tale of something squirmy he found in the Noe Valley store's meat case.

According to Melancon, he found "more than 40" disgusting fly larvae in the case following a customer's complaint.

Whole Foods, on the other hand, played it cool to with Public Health Department after finding the little critters, reporting that only "one dead maggot" had been found and that it had not been in contact with any of the meat. However, if we learned anything from horror movies, it's that no one ever finds just one maggot anywhere.

In light of the creepy revelation, the market's meat case was cleaned out three times last week, and Health Department inspectors say the public's health was never at risk. Whole Foods plans on dismantling their meat case for another cleaning today, followed by a thorough scrubbing of the entire meat department on Tuesday.

KRON4 has more on the "horrific" discovery:

While BART insists that reports of bed bugs on its trains are very rare, a BART train was taken out of service last Thursday for cleaning after a passenger reported finding bed bugs on his legs soon after getting off the train. Ick.

The passenger got on the SFO-bound train at 19th Street in Oakland and reported finding the bugs shortly after he arrived at work.

The train was located and taken out of service immediately, and as the Contra Costa Times reports, BART spokesperson Alicia Trost had this to say about the matter, in an official statement: "Our vehicles are not conducive hosts for insect habitation or propagation, but it is possible that insects can be introduced via the person or belongings of any other riders,Reports of bedbugs are very rare. No other reports have come in."

I'm not sure it's a true statement that all those disgusting, upholstered wool seats with all their little crevices are "not conducive hosts" for bed bugs. But this is just one more reason to head for the cars with the newer, vinyl seats.

[ABC 7]
[CC Times]

The preferred terms, according to one techie interviewed by the Chronicle while working at a Four Barrel Coffee in the Mission, are: "hackers," "makers," or "coders." The dreaded t-word is not only insulting, says one tech venture fund partner, but it might as well be a racial slur.

Like the derogatory "hipster," the term "techie" is apparently only useful until someone turns it on you. For today's Gold Rush column, which is the local paper of record's occasional feature on how tech affects city life, the Chronicle used a highly scientific survey of people on laptops in popular coffee shops to gauge people's temperature on the term. They even tracked someone down to explain the linguistics behind this whole thing:

San Francisco State linguistics lecturer Jenny Lederer said the word "techie" may have started to pick up a set of inferences, which can make a benign, neutral word sound negative - so "techie," like how it's used in the song, may now conjure up ideas of gentrification and entitlement more than, for example, the terms "software engineer" or "tech worker" do.

Adding further insult, Lederer said: "The 'ie' suffix can sound belittling, like 'groupie' or 'yuppie.' The 'er' suffix in English is agentive, as in 'hacker,' thus sounds stronger."

Regarding the cool factor of the word "hacker," we direct your attention back to 1995, a time when even Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie weren't cool:

But what's more insidious says Enrique Landa, identified by the Chronicle as co-founder of Mission-based nerdwear company Cordarounds, is when the term is used to describe not only an industry, but newcomers to the city: "Whenever you get a mass migration of a new wave of people," Landa explained, "you get a negative connotation from the people who were there before - like Mexicans in the Mission. The new wave always gets a bad rap."

Update: An earlier version of this story named Enrique Landa as co-founder of Betabrand, as he was identified in the Chronicle. Betabrand CEO Chris Lindland follows up to say Enrique is not the co-founder of Betabrand, but that the two worked together to create a clothing brand four years earlier. Landa's LinkedIn profile lists Cordarounds — a company which later became Betabrand — among his experience. For his part, Lindland tells us via email: "I (and by extension, Betabrand) have zero interest in whether Techie is a pejorative term. Ranks a zero on the slur scale as I see it."

Previously: Willie Brown Has Some PR Advice For The Tech Industry; NYT Discovers The Tech Boom Backlash
[Chron]

Step aside, turducken. 2013 is all about far weirder Franken-feasts, and these have historical antecedents to boot.

The Atlantic bring us the story of the cockentrice, a totally frightening chimerical creature created by sewing the top half of a suckling pig onto the bottom half of a capon or turkey. The above illustrated recreation was made by culinary "experimental historian" Richard Fitch.

The good people of early modern Europe, roughly the period from 1500-1800, had their own peccadilloes. And one of those was sewing together chimerical animals and then eating them... The specimen above is called a cockentrice (or cockentryce). It is, quite literally, a pig's upper body sewn onto a turkey bottom. The recipe for it dates from the 15th-century, although it was known to be made in later years.

Such stunt-food creations, of course, have contemporary equivalents, though modern tastes tend to shy away from looking at animal heads and feet and such on the dinner table. And everyone is likely feeling squeamish about the obvious sewing that had to happen here, especially if they've been watching American Horror Story.

As for the turducken, which is a deboned turkey stuffed with a duck that's been stuffed with a chicken (or vice versa in some cases), that is mere child's play when compared to the Rôti Sans Pareil, the "Roast Without Equal." You ready for this? Delicious History explains:

[The Rôti Sans Pareil] was created by 19th century French gastronomist Grimod de la Reynière. This testament to human will consisted of seventeen birds that were stuffed in the following order:

• Warbler
• Bunting
• Lark
• Thrush
• Quail
• Lapwing
• Plover
• Partridge
• Woodcock
• Teal
• Guinea Fowl
• Duck
• Chicken
• Pheasant
• Goose
• Turkey
• Giant Bustard

Feeling ambitious this Thanksgiving? Anyone know where we can score a giant bustard?

[The Atlantic]
[Delicious History]

Previously: How To Put All Your Thanksgiving Sides In A Single Franken-Mold, By 4505 Meats

With San Francisco trying hard to redirect the tech sector's focus away from Silicon Valley, a new branding effort coming out of the SoMa's techie hivemind is pushing to re-brand the neighborhood as "Cloud Corridor."

Rather than a concerted push by local real estate agents, this latest neighborhood re-naming effort comes from the tech ilk themselves — in this case the 50 or so companies who make their business "in the cloud." (The nebulous "cloud," in case you've been living under an iRock in the eForest, is basically just what we used to refer to as "The Internet" except there are apps involved.)

The Examiner's Joel Engardio explains the appeal of a fluffy new name:

A dozen San Francisco-based cloud companies met recently to strategize how to get Cloud Corridor into the lexicon. While some are competitors, all would benefit from the common branding. Human resource teams were most excited about using the name to recruit engineers and cloud talent for an experience, not just a job. [...]

Each company promotes the Cloud Corridor in their own marketing efforts. They also try to influence the media and elected officials to say “Cloud Corridor” when referring to San Francisco’s tech industry. They’re hopeful, considering Ed Lee is already known as the “tech mayor.”

If "Cloud Corridor" sounds insufferable, it's because the "The Cloud" is just a trendy marketing term to begin with — one that has suddenly become so ubiquitous it hardly means anything. Earlier this year, the term really became a joke when a developer created app to turn every "Cloud" reference on the internet to "Butt." When you think of SoMa as the "Butt Corridor," it actually kind of makes sense.

On the other hand, at least the marketing team spared us the citywide moniker of "Cloud City," apparently because no one wanted to bother asking George Lucas for the rights. Then we really would have been a Mickey Mouse town.

[SFEx]

Fancy that: a San Ramon fraternity brother, studying and partying hard at Dartmouth, turned himself in this week after he urinated on a woman. Hanover police report the vile dousing happened on Friday, July 5, at the Alpha Delta fraternity. The 27-year-old victim was part of a film crew at the frat house when the incident took place. She later went to police.

Mercury News reports: "After multiple witness interviews, police issued an arrest warrant Thursday for Christopher Kipouras of San Ramon. Kipouras was booked on a public urination charge. He's scheduled to be arraigned in September."

According to his glowing athletics page, Kipouras is a tennis player at the tony institution of higher learning who "plans to study science or engineering at Dartmouth."

In addition to (allegedly) crude behavior from their brethren, Alpha Delta also faces up to $100,000 fines if convicted of providing alcohol to minors stemming from a separate October 2011 incident. The frat house was also the prototype for National Lampoon's Animal House.