Seeing as how San Francisco spends $11.4 million enforcing prostitution, Supe Jake McGoldrick, according to the Examiner, "asked the city attorney to draft legislation directing San Francisco police to make prostitution one of its lowest enforcement priorities." Making the oldest profession in the world a lower priority would possibly "help curb trafficking and exploitation in the sex industry." Just dandy, right? Well, not for Newsom. The Mayor shot down the legislation. saying that "legalization......

Each Tuesday we will feature new music that should (or whatever) be on your radar. Trying to decide what to feature this week was rough. Our choices were slim to none, ranging from the Wu Tang Clan to Bow Wow/Omarion; we just weren't feeling it. Then, we were checking one of our favorite blogs, Stereogum and we came across Vampire Weekend's new song, "I Stand Corrected." We got all excited since we're still reeling from......

First off, we are not gamers. Our Mom decided, at a very young age, that gaming was evil and for the lazy. (Wtf! Right?) We've tried several times to get into it but it seems now that everyone can kick our ass. We hate losing, so we refrain to play but really it's all our Mom's fault. Damn you, parents. Now that we have that out of the way, gaming has become a huge......

Today's toy test event in Union Square....

The cold weather - and holiday festivities - descended upon Gothamist. The Rockefeller Christmas tree was lit, Broadway stagehand finally ended their strike, and NASCAR decided to run their victory lap through Times Square. There were disturbing photographs revealing the working conditions in which many city manholes are produced and ninjas were also a hot topic, either robbing homes or entering into alibis. But the city was really rocked by how Rudy Giuliani's visits......

Londonist got the big scoop of the week with what may be the first images of notorious street artist Banksy in action. They also got on a runaway train without an operator provoking a response from the transport authorities. Elsewhere, London's answer to Central Station is about to open for business, and Londonist got a sneak preview. Meanwhile, spooky goings-on beneath London Bridge, where a cache of skeletons provided an apt story for Hallowe'en.......

Put on your party hats, folks. SF won yet another No. 1 spot to come-look-at-and-eat-interesting-stuff. This time the honor arrives care of Conde Nast Traveller magazine's annual Readers' Choice Awards. Yay. Sure, the only-in-SF tourism industry is an important part of our economy, or whatever. And not that we're complaining -- we have won the top spot for 17 of the past 18 years -- but these types of accolades make us feel that......

Leslie's on the HuffPo cheering on Dan Rather's $70 mil. lawsuit...

We know there's no shortage of young, successful, smart people in this town, but we still turn a little green with envy when we hear about guys like Ben Keighran. The Australia native is only 25 years old. After successfully launching bluepulse in his native land in 2002, he took the show on the road and ended up here in the Bay Area. Like another young tech-maestro we recently spoke to, Keighran houses his company in Silicon Valley (in fact, in YouTube's former quarters), but lives here in the city by the bay....

Even though he defected to Los Angeles, we were tickled when local fave Keith Knight took home a Harvey Award. Now another Bay Area sequential artist is up for a prestigious comics industry award. Melanie "Minty" Lewis was nominated for an Ignatz Award for her P.S. Comics #3, a book we bought at this years' Alternative Press Expo and totally loved....

We're about a week late to this, but our All Star panel of SFist judges (consisting of David Hasslehoff, Allan Colmes, and the Drama Prairie Dog from YouTube fame) have come up with a winner of our "Rename Dodger Stadium Contest"—Brooklyn, by arblatt. This was actually a hard decision because “guest” posted two of our favorite entries, “Chavez Latrine” and “Hell” and as we don't know whom "guest" is, we can't give them anything. So congrats, arblatt, for not just your spiffy answer, but for actually following the rules ...

Oh, sweet irony. Citing reasons to get into the airline game, Sir Richard Branson of Virgin fame said, "the American airline industry is abysmal." That may be true, sir, but it looks like not even Sir Richard's new venture is immune to, you know, reality. Very first flight = delayed....

Apparently, the bottled water industry is ticked off at Gavin Newsom for banning bottled water at City Hall. Many believe that what it takes to produce, distribute, and recycle water bottles is wasteful when you think about all that fine drinking water that’s there for the taking from Hetch Hetchy. Joe Doss of the International Bottled Water Association argues, “The amount of resin needed to make the bottled water containers has been reduced by......

Because kangaroos are so adorably bouncy and keep their little blessings inside of their pouches, the California Supreme Court just overturned the Senate’s May decision to end the ban "on importing and selling kangaroo parts." Namely, the David Beckham-inspired Adidas soccer cleats might not be for sale in California. (That and other Kangaroo-skin featured items.) Although the Senate recently allowed "kangaroo-derived products made by the sporting goods" industry to sell their stuff willy-nilly, the......

Derrick Schneider has an excellent food-focused blog called "Obsession With Food." He also wrote for SFist regularly for quite a long time, most notably his still-popular SFist in the Kitchen series. So of course we were very pleased to see that he wrote an article appearing in the Wine Section of today's Chron. He writes all about "fruit wine," or wine made with fruit other than grapes....

You mean those train tracks are actually used by real trains? The City of Berkeley is working to implement a quiet zone to prevent the freight trains from sounding their whistles at intersections due to complaints from residents of this traditionally industrial area. While we find train horns romantic, we must admit that we might find them less so if they were not so off-in-the-distance. Though we wonder why the City didn't make the developers......

It's always interesting to take an "outside-in" look at our fine city, like when the L.A. Times wrote about the Haight a couple months back. This time, it's the venerable UK-based Economist that's examining our seven-by-seven, in an article entitled "City in a bottle: The strange half-recovery of California's prettiest city."...

When we talked to Phil Bronstein, the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, a few weeks back, he told us that "the Chronicle will continue to be packed with talented journalists who will keep providing what (SFist) Rita called 'an essential public service.'"...

The artists in We, Asian Sex Workers want to make it clear that they are not slaves or victims. They don't need to be "saved," but they would like some respect, or at the very least, sensitivity. As part of the fifth annual San Francisco Sex Worker Festival, curator Gennifer Hirano and artists Sarah Mac, Mariko Passion, Reagan Louie, Tracy Quan, Annie Chen, Surgeon Scofflaw, The Girls of Banteay Srei (Oakland, CA), and Ivy from......

The Napa Valley-based Coalition for Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights issued a statement where it lauded certain members of congress -- Senators Boxer, Snowe and Lautenberg, as well as Representative Thompson -- for showing "tremendous leadership and a great sense of commitment to passengers' rights." The organization warned, however, that congressional rhetoric is not enough....

What do Broken Social Scene and Peaches both have in common? Leslie Feist! The Canadian singer-songwriter performs at the Fillmore tonight with Grizzly Bear. 1805 Geary St., SF. If you can't score tickets to the show, head over to Bottom of the Hill and check out NOMO, an Afro-beat band from Detroit for $10. 1233 17th St, SF. Calling all PSP fans! Head over to the Sony Playstation store at the Metreon to celebrate......

Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park,\ already offers an undergrad degree in wine business -- but now the school is expanding its program. Graduate students cam now earn an MBA in Wine Business. ...

The other day, we told you our impressions of Naia Gelateria (nutshell: pretty good overall; you should particularly dig it if you enjoy having a ton of varieties to choose from). We wanted to know a little more about this Bay Area company, so we approached Trevor Morris, the company's general manager. He's been running the company since 2003, and had prior experience in the restaurant industry before that. He took the time to answer a few questions....

A realtor called Chris Iverson was commenting on the "death of the newspaper industry" over at the 3 Oceans real estate blog. You may think "who the hell is this guy" to comment on the state of ink media. We'll tell you: He's one of the guys that pays (or perhaps used to pay, based on the entry) for ads in the classified sections of newspapers...

. . . some of them, anyway. The Rainbow Grocery Co-op is the first San Francisco-based store to announce that it will exclusively carry cage-free eggs. The news was spread by animal advocacy group East Bay Animal Advocates, whose mission is more or less to create humane conditions for animals within the agriculture industry....

On Saturday, fantastic Hayes Valley comic book store Isotope played host to Ed Brubaker, who's as hot a writer in the comics industry as anyone. Recently, a story of Brubaker's made headlines nationwide (and Colbert, of course): the death of Marvel Comics' icon Captain America. ...

It's a tough biz, the tourism industry -- the cops had to break up a fight between the Bush Man, the Clown Man, and the Fisherman over who got to work what turf on Fisherman's Wharf last weekend. Doesn't the Bush Man just sneak up on the other guys' turf when they're not looking? A large mysterious package in the Sunset on Noriega and 24th occasioned a call to the SFPD bomb squad. Turned......

Jerry Brown, our recenty elected State Attorney General and St. Ignatius College Prep alum, isn't afraid to take the Bush Administration to task for its weak stand on fuel efficency for SUVs, minivans and pickups. He's seeking more than the paltry one-mile-ish increase, to 23.5 miles per gallon from the current 22.2 miles by 2010. He called the change "absurd." Damn right. He posits that a standard of 10 miles-15 miles better would suit us far better. ...

It's SFist Wendy and Liana, chatting about Tuesday night's movie! We were pumped to be headed to the SFIFF again this year with our friend, Liana, who’s from Brazil. We’ve seen several Brazilian films together at the festival over the years, and this year we had a number of good options, but decided on 12 Labours, a film by Ricardo Elias. 12 Labours is the story of Heracles, a young Brazilian boy, recently released......

The last of our slightly less-than-timely coverage of the Alternative Press Expo, which took place last weekend, focuses on folks telling their sequential art stories in a longer form. Which, as much as we love the other stuff, is really what we dig the most. We focus on Ted Naifeh, Dave Dwonch, Joseph Costirlos, Von Allan, Jaimel M. Hemphill, and Javier Gonzalez....