Happy birthday, Leap Day babies! Since it's leap day, there's the obligatory quadriennial articles about how people born today are 75% younger than the rest of us, and the Chron is no exception. The bissextile among us include Dinah Shore, Ja Rule (holla!), Antonio Sabato Jr., and... San Francisco fire chief Joanne Hayes-White! In the article, Peter Hartlaub calls Ms. Hayes-White to wish her a happy birthday and ask her what being a Leap Day......

We're a little late to this story, in part because we spent all day yesterday trying to separate out the hilarious comments from the offensive ones on SFGate.com (it looks like the homophobic ones have already been taken out as of today) -- but in a nutshell, last Friday, Lance Farber, the 47-year-old boyfriend of the city's new planning director John Rahaim trashed their temporary apartment, which the city put them up in and which......

Hey, it's another Polk post, folks! We're thankful to Flickr user Lulu Vision for giving us a heads-up in the SFist Contribute section regarding tonight's Lower Polk Neighbors meeting with SF Fire Department Chief Joanne Hayes-White about Fire Station 3 and how they're trying to make us all go deaf with their sirens. Hilariously enough, this fire station is located right next to Diva's and Grass Roots. Why would they ever want to leave? From......

It's the third annual San Francisco Notable Portrait Auction, to benefit Creativity Explored! We love this event. Creativity Explored is dedicated to promoting works by local developmentally disabled artists, and they invite a group of local celebs to sit for portraits by their artists, and then auction them off with the celebs in attendance. Jonathan Richman (!!!!) will also be playing. The event is this Thursday, April 12 at 111 Minna, and you can......

Total number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 51. (Tony Blair and Ben Fong-Torres both pictured, and thus counted, twice). Number of people in pictures whose names we recognize: 10. (Tony Blair, both Shultzes, Gavin the Newsom, Stanlee Gatti, Joanne Hayes-White, Heather Fong, Milton Friedman, Ben Fong-Torres, Sydney Kohara.) After some deliberation, we did not count Ray Dolby (founder of Dolby Labs) or anyone from Jefferson Airplane. Number of people from Jefferson......

It is cruel to tell people that an outdoor movie screening at the fire station on 19th and Folsom, begins at 8:00 p.m. and to get there early to ensure a seat, when the movie in fact starts at 8:45 and it's freezing cold outside. It's partially our own fault, though -- in our zeal to comply with the time requirements listed, we blithely ignored the sentence in the same release cautioning attendees to "dress......

We'd like to take a moment to break from our usual schedule of links to Gavin Newsom gossip, Web 2.0 snark and other Frisco-centric blog boosterism to highlight the plight of Survival Research Labs. Apparently a quarter-century of creating literally bleeding-edge art from the electro-mechanical detritus of the modern world isn't enough to keep the bulldozers at bay. That's right, having already been blacklisted by the San Francisco Fire Department from ever performing in......

Watch out for that lady in the delivery room! A pregnant woman in San Mateo county, enraged at her baby daddy's constant exhortations to prenatal nutrition, stabbed him in the stomach with a serrated knife. The DA says she's had plenty of criminal cases with a pregnant victim, but never one with a pregnant perp. People in SF are wondering if a browned-out fire station on Market and Sanchez might have been able to save some of the people who died in the fire on Capp Street were it not for the budget cuts. Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White notes that the other fire stations responded within 2-4 minutes of the call and that the people who died had died immediately, but other firefighters are calling for a repeal of the brownouts policy. And glug, glug, glug -- a boat sank off the dock of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, leaving only an oil slick where the 30 x 80 foot barge used to be. The barge probably sank because it was constantly being banged around by its neighbor, the so-called "Artship," which had previously been moored in Oakland as an art gallery. The Artship's current caretakers have taken responsibility for the barge's sinking, and will take the appropriate steps to clean up any pollution caused. ...

Man. Six people were injured, and around 64 people are homeless, after an early morning fire destroyed the big apartment building across the street from Mission Dolores on 16th Street. The firefighters rescued two women and two children from the third floor, where they'd been trapped between the fire on the second floor and the fire on the roof. One guy, who made it out with only his computer, cat, and bike, said, "My friend called me to get the hell out of there, but I hooked up a garden hose to the sink and started pouring water until my hair started burning." He'd lived in the building for ten years. Neither the Mission Dolores nor the synagogue across the street were damaged, due to the wind direction. 120 firefighters responded, and Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White noted it was fortunate that none of the fire stations in the area were on brownout that evening. Picture from Continue Reading "Fire on 16th Street"