For both the New Orleans Saints and the 49ers, this season has suuucked. There's no worse feeling in fandom than unmet expectations. And both of the NFL's gold-helmeted teams have seen the bottom drop out of their dreams for the 2007 season....

One of the best things about living in San Francisco is all the film festivals! We thought we were on top of them, and then we just found out this weekend that the SF Black Film Festival is starting later this week too. We can't keep up! The Ninth Annual Black Film Festival runs this weekend and next at the Theater Artaud and the African-American Art and Culture Complex, and is featuring African and African-American......

Week 13, and the 49ers go to New Orleans for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. Take this moment to make a donation to a hurricane-related charity. They still need help. The column can wait....

We're hugging SFist Franny tight (SFists Sniffy and Monkey are not big huggers), then running out to the Roxie to see the San Francisco SPCA and In Defense of Animals-hosted San Francisco screening of Dark Water Rising: The Truth about Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues. The 75-minute documentary, shot by award-winning filmmaker Mike Shiley, shows the plight of more than 50,000 dogs and cats, who were left behind in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The documentary......

Saturday: SFist Jackson tipped us off to the Swearing Festival starting at 7 at Edinburgh Castle. 5 hours of vulgar speech-related activity sounds like a party to us! Sunday: It's the Tour of California bike race! No, we're so not riding in it, but we're all set to watch it as it whips past us some time between 10 a.m. and 12:22 p.m. Monday: Yay! Presidents day means no (day job) work for this......

Dick Cheney and President Bush can draw a sigh of relief this morning as Chris Daly's resolution calling for the impeachment of the President was scuttled off to committee by Sean Elsbernd. The resolution directs the Clerk of the Board of Supes to send copies of the resolution to statewide political leaders, the Democratic National Committee, and members of the House Judiciary Committee where it will probably sit in a very large in-box on all of their respective desks along-side credit card offers, Value Pak coupons, and pleas from Hurricane Katrina victims for more money to keep them from being evicted. ...

First, the obvious: There are two episodes of "Arrested Development" airing tonight, a new one at 8 p.m, and a re-run of "My Hand to God," in which Buster tries to deal with the loss of his hand, and Michael attempts to find out if he's really the father of Maggie's child. (Julia Louis Dreyfuss guest stars.) In other news, we were pretty bummed when we realized we had missed Oprah's Christmastime Favorite Things......

Saturday: We're going to the first Amoeba Auction, planned to be a weekly event to directly aid musicians and independent relief efforts on the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina. Unique, one of a kind, and collectible items (the VIP tickets to Bauhaus at the Warfield will be ours, bitches!) Amoeba will match all winning bids from the auctions, so you can bid with impunity. It all starts at 4. Sunday: We're taking SFist Franny......

With the baseball season over, we are now faced with this big question: now what do we do with ourselves? -Bay Area bound refugees from Hurricane Katrina are discovering something about the Bay Area: it's friggin expensive here. FEMA gives families a little over $2000 a month to get by until they get resettled either elsewhere or back in New Orleans and as we all know, $2000 a month in the Bay Area doesn't get you very far. Especially if you have a family. And that's not the only problem. In a quote we find awfully scary for various reasons, one of the evacuees said he was looking at a place in West Oakland, but didn't want to move there because, among other things, the "schools weren’t good." Considering Louisiana is well known as a poor, backwards-ass state, what does that say about the schools in Oakland? -In response to the increasingly controversial controversy over TIC conversions and Ellis Act evictions, Gavin has announced that he will form a task force to look into it and got Aaron Peskin to help out. We're not experts on housing policy, but we think we can save a whole bunch of time and money with this solution to the issue: build more housing. ...

This is usually the part where we remind you of how insanely easy it is to reserve books online from the SFPL, or to buy them from one of our fine local independent bookstores. But today peanut butter and chocolate come together at the Friends of the SF Public Library's 41st Annual Big Book Sale, which begins tomorrow and runs until October 2 at the Festival Pavilion in Fort Mason Center. All books have......

Saturday We're going to Southern Relief's first SF Fundraiser for the Victims of Katrina. There will be t-shirts, tote bags, stickers, pins, baked goods and a prize drawing in exchange for donations to the Red Cross Hurricane Katrina relief effort. On the steps of the Christian Science Church (655 Dolores) from 10:00am to 3:00pm. Sunday we're going down to Union Square for KRON 4's Sex and the City Premiere Party. This will be our......

Local theaters help out with hurricane relief....

Even though this column’s supposed to be about the bars of San Francisco, given the unbelievably tragic events of the last couple of weeks, we simply must pay due respect to the drinkin’-est city this side of Bavaria. Of course we're talkin' bout New Orleans. Things may look bad now, but we know that you’ll rise again and take back your rightful place at the throne of Fat Tuesday’s mayhem. Even though we’ve never......

Cares is in a bit of shock, actually. We just can't stop watching the news and hoping that maybe, just maybe, at some point Wolf Blitzer turns to the camera and says "Psyche!". That's how wishful our thinking has become. We're a week on from when Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast of the US and still rescue efforts are continuing. Continuing. They're not over by a longshot but the progress that's been made......

With all the tragic events going on in the South, it's way too tempting to look for an angle and try to find a way to make it about ourselves. But we do have a local angle happening right here in the Bay Area, a pretty interesting one, in fact. And that is the fact that tonight; the Oakland Raiders are playing the suddenly homeless New Orleans Saints. It goes without saying that the events of Hurricane Katrina make things like sports come off as meaningless. More so about a football game that's meaningless to begin with. But yet, despite it all, teams are still trying to get in some practice, players are fighting for spots, and football goes on. The Saints arrived in the Bay Area last Monday to train at San Jose State University, fleeing the city on Sunday night, one of the last flights allowed out of New Orleans. The trip was several days earlier than planned. Team members have said that they spent most of the time leading up to their flight trying to get their families out. Several players have also admitted to missing team meetings because they were too wrapped up in watching the news to make it. ...

Bet you're sorry now that you didn't pick San Francisco for the Video Music Awards, MTV! Apparently all pre-VMA parties for Sunday's VMAs in Miami have been cancelled in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The storm hit Miami right as this year's VMA host, Sean Combs (we are now point-blank refusing to call him Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, or Diddy, because, well, that's ridiculous) cut the ceremonial ribbon at "Hotel MTV" on Wednesday, so yesterday and tonight's parties all got cancelled. Sorry, Ricky Martin's listening party and the Hotel MTV B-Ball Tournament f/ the Ying Yang Twins and Mike Jones! See, MTV? Gavin was right; we would have been an excellent venue! We're having bee-yoo-tee-ful weather out here this weekend -- not too hot, not too cold, and the fog makes for beautiful sunsets. SF would have been a great place to watch our local boys from Green Day win some Moonmen. Oh well, MTV -- we'll just enjoy our city without you this weekend. (Gosh, we hope Farnsworth Bentley's umbrella doesn't flip inside out over Mr. Combs in the high winds out there in Miami, that would be terrible.) ...