鼠! Happy New Year!......

A salute to a stand up bridge ...

If you're still recovering from the comment war over the Western-calendar New Year dance party with the Falun Gong, we've got a nice non-sectarian Chinese New Year musical performance with the SF Symphony to soothe your spirits! The SF Symphony rings in the Year of the Pig with their annual East-meets-West lunar new year afternoon concert on Saturday, Feb. 24 -- this year's performances feature works by local Asian-American composer Gang Situ, a traditional "gong......

Happy New Year everyone! What We Did On Our Christmas Vacation After having our plans to fly to Denver thwarted by a sinister snowstorm, we headed straight to Texas. We spent most of the time in Houston with our family and managed to type out our top 10 albums of '06 while our nephews watched "Pirates of the Carribbean" for the nth time. One night was spent in Austin with one of our favorite people......

In the spirit of New Year's Eve, we present to you the bad idea that is the Art Shell drink....

It's the annual Best Of post, the one post in the year where I get to use the first person singular! Hooray! From the Starbucks (not really a) bomber in January to the opening of the Daiso in December, it was certainly one heck of a year, wasn't it? There was BUSH TER DOWN; the Chron's series about police brutality getting upstaged by their misidentification of the cop in question; Kimberly Guilfoyle's new boyfriend,......

Happy New Year everyone! Were any of your holiday presents of the musical variety? If not, don't fret because our giveaways are back. This week you can enter to win a copy of local chanteuse Paula Frazer's Leave The Sad Things Behind, released in October on local label Birdman Records. Paula's Cline-esque croon floats angelically over spooky, romantic songs with lush instrumentation including horns and steel guitar. Sounds like the soundtrack to a love scene......

There's not a whole lot of movies opening up this weekend, or at least none mentioned in the Chron as they were too busy with their annual "New Year's Eve Hat" cut-out, a tradition looked forward to by no one and an idea so lame it doesn't even work ironically. Suffice it to say, that with the big holiday movies already being released, the studios have been quietly dumping their Oscar-bait movies on us, those......