A cafe worker in the Mission District is being hailed as a hero for jumping out from behind the counter to pummel a would-be backpack thief Friday morning and hold him until police arrived.

The incident happened at Carlin's Cafe at Valencia and 14th streets around 6:45 am on Friday, and as Mission Local reports, it was cafe worker Nick Grant who sprang into action as soon as the masked assailant entered the cafe and grabbed a customer's backpack and sprayed bear mace in the customer's direction.

In surveillance video, you can see Grant push a service cart full of pastry boxes into the suspect, and then grab him and begin pummeling him with punches. The suspect also sprayed bear mace into Grant's face, temporarily blinding him, and he says he's still having breathing problems from it.

A neighbor walking by, Jim Carroll, who had seen the masked assailant enter the cafe and then the ensuing fight, also sprang into action and ran into the cafe.

As Carroll tells KPIX, "I was on the phone with 911 and I tried to assess the situation and figure out which one was the robber. I figured out which one it was and put my arm around his neck."

Both Caroll and Grant held the assailant down until police arrived and took him into custody. Carroll also got bear-sprayed.

Grant, who says he was raised by Marines, tells Mission Local, "Luckily I had the background and training to be that right guy at the right time."

Cafe owner Matt Carlin, whose grandfather originally ran this cafe, tells Mission Local that Grant insisted on coming back into work for his Saturday morning shift, adding, "We need more people like him."

Apparently the customer whose backpack was saved from being robbed was back in the cafe early Saturday, and Grant says they're now on a first-name basis. As he tells Mission Local, "Before yesterday I just knew him as ‘ham egg and bagel guy.'"

According to the SFPD, the suspect was briefly hospitalized for injuries unrelated to the incident, and he was booked on multiple charges.

This story, which occurred in Folsom (east of Sacramento), reads like something right out of a movie. On Monday evening, 17-year-old Todd McHugh of Citrus Heights saw a car swerve, veer off the road, and then get stuck on the Folsom light rail track. When McHugh ran over to the car, he saw that the driver had fallen asleep for a second and was in a daze, and her 7- and 10-year-old daughters were in the backseat. He quickly helped the woman out of the car, and she unbuckled the kids.

Meanwhile, a train was approaching, and another bystander tried to flag a warning to the train. It was dark though, and the speed along that section of tracks is 55 miles per hour. The train driver braked, but it was too late. Seconds after the family was rescued, their car was demolished. The train was also damaged, but no one was injured.

No word on why the driver of the car had fallen asleep. She reportedly doesn't speak English, and was understandably in shock.

It looks like one of San Jose's most trusty traffic cops was also in a giving mood. The Invisible Children van got a parking ticket. They were parked illegally (see the red curb in the bottom right-hand corner, pictured above), right next to the tour bus, next to the San Jose Events Center. (Douche bags.) We wonder: who will actually pay for this parking ticket? Will Wentz cough up the dough or is he too busy promoting his sex tapes on youtube? Maybe it will come out of the donations from 13 year-old fans. God, we hope not.

Photos taken by author

Born Riccardo DiGuglielmo, Wilson changed his name while working as an actor in efforts to avoid typecasting as an Italian-American. Little did he know that he would be typecast as America's favorite, um, cleanup enthusiast.

Emigrating to the U.S. from England as wee lad, he went on to star in over 500 -- 500?! -- Charmin commercials. His acting and squeeze-shunning abilities landed him a free lifetime supply of toilet paper from Procter & Gamble as well a place in American po(o)p culture. (Heh.) Sure, he played the alcoholic on several episodes of Bewitched, and did bit parts on Hogan's Heroes and The Bob Newhart Show, but in the world of TP commercial acting, he was a star.

Although the Associated Press tarnishes this man's good name by labeling him a "closeted squeezer," we refuse to believe such a thing. He was simply led astray by overzealous shoppers. And we salute you, Mr. Wilson cum Whipple. Toilet paper commercials have gotten excessively crass for us over the years. Images of cartoon bears with flecks of paper on their behinds and euphemistic blue-colored water tearing apart brands that are more fragile are much too revealing for us. Back when such things like urination and bowel movements weren't discussed, much less admitted to having as a bodily function, we had Mr. Whipple to conceal it all for us. He didn't remind us what toilet paper was used for; he let us know what it wasn't meant for: molesting. RIP, Mr. Whipple.

If there's anybody in the city taking more heat than Mike Nolan, it's his quarterback, Alex Smith. Smith stands accused by the Faithful of not very being good. The evidence? Overthrowing Receivers. Underthrowing Receivers. Not seeing open Receivers. The numbers back up the evidence-- he has a preposterously low QB rating (57.2) and completion percentage (48.7). He is also 11-19 as a starting QB. In the games we've watched, Smith looked like the same QB he was when he first started-- skittish and inaccurate-- so much so, the Faithful are muttering that Smith, as a #1 draft pick, has been a bust of Lucy Pinder-like proportions (sort of NSFW-y).

There are many theories out there for his general awfulness. Is he still hurt? Is the new offensive coordinator lame? Was the brief glimmer of decent play all due to Norv? He also played in a spread offense in college and there's a theory that QBs who play in gimmicky college offenses don't do well in the NFL. And maybe he just isn't a very good QB?

And speaking of #1 draft picks, there is the Raiders. The only reason to care about the Raiders right now is the eventual Coming of JaMarcus. After all, what else do Raiders fans have left to care about? The Raiders are like this season of "Heroes"-- boring and awful with only the possibility of something interesting happening towards the end as the only reason to keep watching-- Save the QB, Save the World. So why isn't the big guy playing? Is he not ready yet? Or maybe it's because whenever Al reappears from his cryogenic freezer, he mandates that the Raiders still need to just win, baby. After all, the AFC West is God-awful and a Raiders' Colorado Rockies-like run can actually send them into the playoffs and that probably won't happen with JaMarcus at the helm. Then again, it probably won't happen with Josh or Daunte and Andrew at the helm either.

The premise of the movie is that a famous Jewish acting professor, Adolf Grunwald, sent to a concentration camp in World War II, is summoned by Joseph Goebbels to coach a depressed and lackluster Adolf Hilter through a January 1944 speech in the bombed-out Berlin. Pretty much no fascist joke is unspared in the unnervingly-hilarious script, which in short order mocks the German love of paperwork, the Nazi salute, Hitler's bed-wetting and poor sexual prowess, and features the Fuhrer being humped by a dog to boot. Kind of like Hogan's Heroes, as written by Borat.

Along the way, the movie takes a thoughtful turn towards tougher questions of complicity and personal integrity, while also barreling through a mildly-convoluted and entertainingly-unrealistic plot towards its inevitable conclusion. (Spoiler! Hitler lives to lose the war.) What we particularly liked about the movie was that even while exploring the various sadnesses in his pathetic Fuhrer character's life, writer/director Dani Levy (who won this year's SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award) never allows you to feel bad for Hitler in any way.

The world premiere of played on Saturday night at the Castro Theatre and the house was packed.

One of the themes running through the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival last year was about how there weren't enough Asian-American men in movies. Clearly things have not improved since out of the three movies we saw over the weekend, two of them featured the same dude (Ken Leung) as the male lead (and the third one was a Japanese anime).

Shanghai Kiss is the story of a struggling 28 year-old Asian-American actor (the perspicacious Ken Leung) in L.A. who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a 16 year-old girl (played by Hayden Panettiere of ABC's "Heroes"). He's forced to confront both his identity crisis and his troubled relationship with his father when he inherits a house in Shanghai where he meets the lovely Kelly Hu (who also stars in an ABC series, "In Case of Emergency" and who is in another SFIAAFF film this year too).

After the jump: donkeys in Compton or taking the bus in LA? And the director's poignant story about his father.