One of our favorite things about baseball is the 7th Inning Stretch. There's something about a stadium full of people standing up and singing a completely quaint, nearly 100 year-old-song in our jaded, post-post punk, post-post modern, post-post-ironic age that gives us the warm fuzzies. But at last Sunday's Giants game, the Giants continued on with a new tradition that is slowly and quickly ruining the 7th Inning Stretch-- the playing of "God Bless America" right before "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." And yes, we do hate America, why do you ask? ...

Yay San Francisco Zoo! Not only did it win back its accreditation, but it also vaulted into Comedy Central gold with an inspired intern's (possibly unauthorized?) email to the Colbert Report show asking if Stephen Colbert would be interested in having a baby bald eagle named after him. Genius! The picture to your left is a still from the show, featuring John Ashcroft's rendition of "Let The Eagle Soar," as Stephen picked his namesake hatchling-to-be. (Click here to watch the video -- it's labeled "Stephen Jr.") According to the zoo, this is all part of its Bald Eagle Breeding Program, which was started in 1985 to repopulate California with eagles after they almost died out because of DDT. Since 1991, the SF Zoo has released 90 bald eagle chicks into the wild, and this year, the eagles have laid 17 eggs so far, one of which is Stephen Jr. When they hatch, about half of the chicks will be raised on Catalina Island, and the other half will be raised at the conservation center and released on Santa Cruz Island. Check out on the right what little fuzzy Stephen Jr. will look like when he makes it out of his chiton shell! Webcam fans, watch the eggs here (site appears to have down for now, but will hopefully come back up soon -- click on Eagle Nest Cam). John Ashcroft fans, click here for video and audio clips of "Let The Eagle Soar."...

Oh lord, do we ever kid (though we can't wait until John Ashcroft Googles that and finds us. Hey, John, check out our coverage of Frameline 29!). It seems that the new 'powers' granted by the Patriot Act (which, of course, don't include finding Osama), have allowed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to turn up a Hayward man, Noor Alocozy, who wired an unspecified amount of money to Jack Idema in Afghanistan as......

It's been a while since our last Get Ur Geek On, so we've got a lot of hottness today and will use a bullet list, power-point style, because our attention spans have begun to shrivel in inverse proportion to our abdomen's expansion: Dan Gillmor, the last top tech writer standing at the San Jose Mercury News, has decided to leave the Knight-Ridder corporate family to become a 'Citizen Journalist.' Is that a fancy term for......

Medical marijuana finds its way back to the Supreme Court. Man, you just can't kill that weed!...

http://www.bingwalker.com/archives/san_francisco/index.html Cancun...

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia -- oh, we're just the good ol' reliable Bay Area in Election 2004, no one cares about us -- no one's wooing us, no one's filling up our airwaves with "I'm George Bush and I approved this message" disclaimers, America Coming Together and Berkeley's own moveon.org aren't hosting Springsteen and Dixie Chicks concerts at the Shoreline, and no one's marketing W ketchup at our local farmers' markets. So us lovelorn political junkies are bubbling with enthusiasm over this week's triple bill -- John Edwards at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, raising $1.5 million and showing his support of the striking hotel workers, Jesse Jackson speaking at the Commonwealth Club last night, and John Ashcroft at the Tech Museum in San Jose today, ominously intoning that "Young people must learn ... of the risk of intellectual property theft." In Cleveland, Ohio or Erie, Pennsylvania, they'd probably just view that showing as pretty second-tier (and they'd be right), but for us -- wow! People actually coming here to promote national political agendas! It really must be the cheese! ...