When first reading the headline, "Google Gives All SF Homeless Free Voicemail" on our Digg feed, we didn't get it. Why the heck would the homeless want free voicemail? Aren't there more vital things the homeless need? Perhaps in our over-cellular phone'd society, we overlooked the importance of having a way for people to reach us. Google recognized the need for the homeless to have some connection to loved ones and plan to do something......

Someone reports, asks the following about city-enforced personal hygiene of the homeless population: I saw a city water truck soak a homeless guy and all his stuff this morning. The guy was camped out on Bryant about a block from the courthouse when the truck drove up and sprayed him with a firehose type spout. The guy freaked and ran to get away. Does the city routinely route out the homeless with these tactics?......

We interrupt your holiday frivolity, wild binge drinking, and high stress levels to bring you the following event: Tomorrow night the annual Homeless Death Memorial March takes place. A Day of the Dead, if you will, for those of us who passed away this year without having a place to call home. You want more info? Here you go: Please join us to commemorate homeless people—our friends, relatives, neighbors, acquaintances, and even some who......

Chucky appears to be back on the homeless beat this week with two stories about it. One is something that might piss people off, the other something that might not piss people off. We'll start with the one that might piss people off one first so we can cheer everyone up at the end with the one that won’t piss people off and make the post heart-warming, just in time for the holidays. ...

No, not Frank Chu -- although a Gav versus a crazy would be most fascinating, indeed -- Carmen Chu. Let's back up a bit here: In her first hickory-bold move since taking over for he who shall remain nameless, Chu decided to chip away at the homeless problem in the Sunset. Chu, according to the Examiner, "publicly demanded that several city departments come up with a specific plan to address her west side district’s homeless......

Hey, remember yesterday, when everyone at SFist chimed in on the "what to do when a homeless kid's dog bites your friend on the leg" question? We got quite a few interesting answers, and one suggestion that we get in touch with the good folks at San Francisco Animal Control to see what they suggest doing in those circumstances. Deb Campbell was kind enough to answer a few of our questions: What would Animal......

Oh, this looks like fun. While hogging the Internet today, we came across this Yahoo group for the homeless, which bills itself as a "unique, independent, community based support group, moderated by anonymous homeless and formerly homeless volunteers, in San Francisco, California." It's great. The homeless or lease signers among us can send them tips, blow whistles, upload real photos of meals served in several shelters, see photos of health and hygiene conditions at......

We were in the Upper Haight last night, walking with friends along the street to the Magnolia for a late-ish dinner. We walked past a small group of punk-ish kids sitting on the street with a "give us some money [insert ironic saying here]" sign. They were talking with a guy who was standing there with a beautiful husky dog on a leash. We'll repeat - that dog was gorgeous. As we passed by, the......

-- Today is Yelp Day. How did you celebrate? Yeah, same here. (With all due respect to Yelp, Newsom will declare anything _____ Day these days, won't he?) [Eater SF] -- Ooooh! Those apartments near the Mint and Mezzanine. We want one. [Curbed SF] -- Homeless vets. [BeyondChron] -- Freight & Salvage wins $1.161 million? Jesus. [SFBG] -- Beth Spotswood totally likes Donnie Wahlberg. [Culture Blog] -- SF's EIR, bicyclists, and you. [Left in......

Sigh. The popular kids are at it again. No stranger to playing fast and loose with the law, noted homeless taxi driver Grasshopper Kaplan -- you remember, that guy who ran for mayor this year and received a decent 1,400 votes -- was arrested yesterday. Why? According to the Snitch, he was "sentenced on Monday to nine months in county jail for threatening a passenger while driving his unlicensed taxi." Hmm. How zany. Oh......

Submit your Bay Area finds to found [at] sfist [dot] com, or tag them sfist and found on Flickr! Let us know where and when you found the item and any other helpful details. Today's find was sent to us by SFist reader/commenter Jerry Jarvis, which he found somewhere along Howard Street. We can imagine how much it would suck to come to work and find someone sleeping/peeing in your storefront every morning, but the......

Here's todays sports news...

Proposition D is a library bond initiative. Let's be clear: we love the public library. Sure, the main building is a little weird looking and they've been restoring it for two years and it functions as a daytime homeless shelter, but...everything in there is free, and if you are trying to find something, the staff knows pretty much everything. The city library is a fantastic resource, and functions a heckuva lot better than, oh,......

image credit: apbh2's Flickr account Writing in SFGate yesterday, CW Nevius tells us that the "Rights of Mentally Ill Street People Thwart Efforts to Prevent Harm." Those pesky rights! What happened was that the "Sign Guy" of Justin Herman Plaza was arrested after attacking a police officer, when it was pretty clear that someone (the City? Men in white coats?) should have intervened sooner. Let us be clear that this Sign Guy is not......

Smack-dab in the center of today's Craft & Artistan Marketplace and homeless dinner hour, the Cardboard Tube Fight Tournament commenced. We captured it (and at times, poorly, we must admit) on our sad little BlackBerry. The images don't do the scene justice: like, there were a lot of nerds there. A lot. Each and every one as adorable as the next. Plus, the results are in for today's battle of hardened tubular paper. A......

Photo of a large bird doing its best to survive in a somewhat polluted environment. ...

Matier & Ross today have a story about a police officer who is in a little bit of trouble for writing a letter to the Chron criticizing the Mayor's homeless policy. In the letter, officer John Lewis, complained that the current plan, mainly to roust the homeless at 4 in the morning, is ineffective and that the homeless people he encounters neither wants services nor are scared off by the idea of citations. His idea is to roust the homeless, or at least watch over them, during the day when the homeless aren't asleep but in their full drunken/drugged out state. Lewis is now "under investigation" with the possibility of being reprimanded for what could easily be assumed as his act of letter writing. ...

Last week's winner, the Bay Guardian. Tim Redmond says the Navy is the gayest armed services branch. Well, sure. Cars are worse than homeless people, says a letter writer. Halloween will suuuuuck. A former director of Intersection for the Arts died in a car crash. The new crackdown on homelessness, and why aren't people more upset? Cover article: Our pals at SwapSF make the cover! About the whole freetail trend! Yay SwapSF! (and other freegans!)......

After last week's dueling press conferences and memo-leakage, the Homeless issue is becoming the Issue du Jour, leading to a full-fledged reporter dogpile. First came CW Nevius who weighed in with yet another story on the issue, this time saying that even in liberal, tolerant, San Francisco, residents might not be feeling so liberal and tolerant when it comes to dealing with the homeless. As evidence, he points to one of those online polls SFGate ran about the issue in which 90% of the people said they wanted something to be done. We, as a rule, hate those "polls" because it's actual scientific value is nil as it's all determined by people who were motivated enough to play along and doesn’t factor in those who were too lazy to. ...

With Gavin caught up in a tough re-election campaign against...ummm...well...huh.... he's started playing up his street people street cred. Recently, he announced a plan to deal with all the vagrants caught doing vagrant-like by sending out "Homeless Outreach Teams" to deal with it. The teams consist of police officers and social services and when they catch somebody doing something unpleasant, they're supposed to give them a choice between going into outreach services or being issued a citation, which as far as we can tell, is the handing out of giant frowny faces that will be put on a giant white board in the local police station. The program will be focused on targeted areas around Union Square and SOMA, read, tourist traps. Apparently, tourists don't appreciate seeing people defecate in the streets while riding the Cable Cars and eating soup in a sourdough roll-- kinda gives new meaning to the phrase "San Francisco Treat." Gavin has been putting putting some of these policies into effect lately but is now making a bigger deal out of it. ...

Free range, organic, hormone-free, but not self-sustaining. This young lady (the one on the right) was asking for "change for BART" while toting a fetching little purse outside of Whole Foods on 4th and Harrison. (We apologize for the horrendous quality of the photo, but since this gal will probably be powering up her fancy new iMac later this evening and logging onto SFist, we're sure she'll be grateful that our cell phone takes......

No, not Ed. That's been done. Homeless SF mayoral candidate Grasshopper Kaplan was booked "on suspicion of stalking and use of a vehicle for habitation" -- is that really illegal? using your ride as your home? -- after taking a nap in his taxi while parked in the driveway of Ed Jew's 28th Avenue (non-)residence yesterday. It seems that he did it to make a statement about homelessness, affordable housing, the moon, or whatever. Maybe......

We're starting to run out of ways to introduce these stories about the murder count in SF, so we're going with a clip of "Miss Murder" by AFI, above. So here's the latest: Two more bodies were found today. One person was found shot to death in the head around 9:30 last night near Monster Park, and this morning, a woman walking in Golden Gate Park saw a dead body in a grove of......

Photo of the new Ruca store at Haight and Ashbury...

Someone in Vallejo (or San Francisco?) thinks he's freakin’ hilarious flooding 911 with crank calls. The crank caller has been using a donated cell phone, perhaps one that was donated to the homeless (why do the homeless need cell phones?), to call in fake emergencies. The man, known as “Nomar” has made around 2,000 calls to 911 since March. Calls, it seems, are made in San Francisco, but are about incidents in Vallejo. These......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

Man, this dull-as-dishwater mayoral "race" is getting us in the blogging doldrums. Someone do something funny, quick! Meanwhile, we'll pass along the news of the latest progressive hope for the Newsom mayoral steamroller juggernaut, Quintin Mecke. Mecke's the director of the Safety Network Partnership, active on homelessness and public safety issues, praises Project Homeless Connect, and has worked on Chris Daly's, Matt Gonzalez's, and Ross Mirkarimi's campaigns. His first order of business is going to......

We were on the 7 a few days ago and four gutterpunk types were complaining about how the city had taken their stuff from camps in Golden Gate Park. One of them, a long-haired fellow with a small backpack and very large pants, went on and on about how he was going to get a grant to put GPS chips in all of his things so he could get them back. Who, exactly, would pay......

"Cult Alert!" flyers garnished lamp posts on Third and Market Streets the other night -- a siren song if ever we've heard one. (It seems like forever since SF's been plagued with a jazzy, crazy-ass cult. No offense, L. Ron.) In case you missed them, or in case the quality of life sect tore them down, the missives cried out: Cult Alert! Please be advised: Youth With a Mission (YWAM) has been under investigation......

-- Litz Plummer, the Opera Lady: Wow. This should be an interesting combo: Coming to the Eagle this evening is the opera lady. You know? The one who sings on Maiden Lane, near the Hermes store. (Where you buy all of your blue separates, just like us?) She's part of tonight's "Thursday Night Live" along with All My Pretty Ones and Carletta Sue Kay. 10 p.m., the Eagle Tavern, 12th St. & Harrison; $5.......