Ladies and gentlement, we give you San Jose's Mr. Joey Chestnut, who yesterday secured his place in history by eating sixty-six Nathan's hotdogs in 12 minutes in Nathan's yearly 4th of July competition. In doing so, Chestnut earned the coveted "Yellow Mustard Belt."...

--One person is dead after a Caltrain hit a car in Palo Alto this afternoon. [CBS 5, Merc News.] --The Lauryn Hill show sucked. [The Chron, All Shook Down, the Inside Bay Area Buzz blog.] --What's Berkeley going to do after this Supreme Court ruling? [The Trib.] --Blogging from the iPhone line in Walnut Creek. [Contra Costa Times.] --A fight over a local grad student's blog post about racial and class divisions on MySpace and......

Hope you had a good July 4 this week! Namely, we hope you didn't come anywhere near Joey Chestnut's 2nd place hot dog eating contest finish at your barbecues of choice. It was a week of transit woes -- Caltrain fares going up, inconvenient MUNI routes, and BART breakdowns. It wasn't any better on the roads, either -- some drag-racing teenage girl killed two members of the Tongan royal family in a car accident in......

Ain't no better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than by watching the Coney Island Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Competition: our buddies at the mothership Gothamist even liveblogged the whole thing! (yes, yes, it's terrible that Americans waste so much food when people in Africa are starving. We promise to give money to Jeffrey Sachs's End of Poverty program to atone for our rapacious delight today, okay?) And what's our local connection? Second-place eater and up-and-coming American star Joey Chestnut, who almost dunk-and-swallowed top dog Takeru Kobayashi out of first place with a strong start out the gate. Chestnut's a San Jose State engineering student! Yay Area whut! Alas, Chestnut started to flag about 6 minutes in, allowing Kobayashi to peristalsis his way back up to the top at the end. A nail-biter, to be sure -- but now Chestnut's claiming some malfeasance might have occurred -- at around dog 50, people noticed that Kobayashi might have suffered what the eating competition circuit delicately terms a "reversal of fortune," which is an automatic DQ from the competition. Witnesses say that Kobayashi spit up into a cup, but that he (warning, it's gross) swallowed it back down before it hit the table -- which doesn't count. Chestnut's decided to view it as a bad refereeing call, and promises to be back again next year. This summer, Chestnut's training regimen included drinking 2 gallons of warm water every morning to stretch his stomach; eating 40 dogs a day 3 days a week, and the day before he left for New York, he ate 54 dogs in a practice run. We may be betraying our Bay Area affiliation here, but we're hoping they were Rosamunde dogs. Picture from the Chron by Laura Morton....

We were just talking about how much we love food competitions! San Jose's own competitive eater Joey Chestnut has kicked off the Super Bowl in style, winning the annual Wing Bowl competition in Philly by eating 173 chicken wings over the course of the day. All wings must be stripped -- strict rule. Chestnut qualified for the competition by drinking a gallon of milk in 41 seconds. The Wing Bowl is a pre-Super Bowl tradition, and has been running since 1993. This year was the "Virgin Bowl," because for the first time, past winners were excluded from competition, meaning that our favorite competitive eater (scroll to 7/9/05, for a sample of our bloggery in the pre-SFist days), Sonya The Black Widow Thomas, couldn't re-eat her way to the top this go-around. Local boy Joey Chestnut is considered a breakout rookie on the competitive eating circuit, coming in third in this year's Coney Island hot dog competition, second only to The Black Widow and the famous Kobayashi. Chestnut's beaten Thomas once before, in the Waffle House waffle-off (18.5 waffles in 10 minutes), and almost beat Kobayashi in this year's Krystal burger competition (and was even leading him at one point, the first time in competitive eating history that anyone's outeaten Kobayashi). He's considered a lock for the prestigious title of competitive eating rookie of the year. ...