We swear, this guy is one step away from strapping road flares to his chest. Now, it's increasingly difficult for us to explain the conceptual art that is Michael Savage's work. Its genius lies in its demented complexity. But according to Bay City News (via CBS 5), Savage recently "sued the Council on American-Islamic Relations in federal court in San Francisco Monday over the group's use of his words on its Web site." Apparently,......

As our little Nancy Pelosi is discovering it's good to be Speaker of the House. Your peeps get some shout outs, you get to name who chairs what (even if they don't know the difference between the two branches of Islam that are currently killing each other in Iraq), and you get to chill with rock stars, as Nancy is, having the pleasure of hanging with Bono for Bono's semi-annual visit to congress. ...

We found this story on the KGO site whle cruising around looking for Day Around the Bay stories and we thought we'd write about it. But then we watched the video of it and decided not to, mainly because it's basically perfect as is. There's nothing we could add to it that would make it more awesome than the story already is. Basically, what the story is about is this guy who is hanging a figure that looks like an arab (he says it's not an arab but a "terrorist" for which we are all missing the subtelty in his caricture). He was hanging the figure from a tree but after a complaint was made, the cops told him to take it down. So he moved it into his front lawn where it will stay until we "finish the job in Iraq". ...

Shanghaiist probably knows a little more about China than the Chicago Sun-Times. Giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one. The city does to have a music scene. Don't even front like they don't. They also have Dorito bananas and white guys shopping for wives. What they don't have is any more tolerance for jaywalkers. Bostonist sees Boston and Somerville each whip out their art and face off. A plagiarized novel is the......

Over the last week in Oakland, shops have been laid waste, a store has burned to the ground, and a controversial religious organization has been implicated but denied its involvement. While our headline could be all too common, our personal experience makes the recent crimes all the more troubling. According to the Oakland Tribune, last Wednesday, a number of men in black suits, white shirts and bow ties vandalized two liquor stores in West......

-The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that an East Contra Costa County school can teach Islam by having the students pretend to be Muslim for three weeks. As part of a history course at Excelsior School for seventh graders, a teacher had students role-play being Muslim to help learn Islam. So the kids adopted Muslim names, read religious poetry, gave up something to simulate Ramadan, and stoned girls for not wearing burkas......

SFist welcomes all our new food column contributors to SFist reads. We, ourselves, have been known to check out cookbooks we reserved online from the SF Public Library, but we're way more likely to just buy them for keeps from one of our fine local independent bookstores. What makes you decide to buy a book, as opposed to checking it out from the library? Tell us in the comments! Before we get to the......

The hard-bitten prose of the Tenderloin Dashiell Hammett returns with an update of the SFPD Northern District crime blotter (mirrored on sfwall.net). A highlight: man walking around trying all the door handles on cars, with his ding-dong hanging out. As our laconic narrator tells us,

One might call this brand of incident a crossover crime. If the suspect fails at one, he may succeed at another. We're being factitious here of course. Suffice it to say that the man was using his hands when he tried to open the car doors.