Chenery House owner, colorful San Francisco ad man, and entrepreneur Bob Pritikin bought Hitler's globe this week for a cool $100,000. The globe, snatched fom Hitler's desk in the ruins of his Eagle's Nest retreat, was found by WWII U.S. soldier John Barsamian and put up for auction this week in San Francisco. Now, before you go labeling Pritiklin an anti-Semite, this man is character -- a true collector and unique hoarder. His home......

Aw. This kind of sucks. School teacher Margaret Pavese got slapped with a misdemeanor charge for causing the 47+-acre Lick fire that erupted on Labor Day Weekend. Apparently, she was using a burn barrel to get rid on some refuse the environmentally happy way. Oops. According to the Chronicle, she could "face a maximum of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine...or all of the $13 million it cost to fight the fire, prosecutors......

Labor Day may mark the end of summer for most, but for TV fans, it's the beginning of the Fall TV season that really signals the end of summer and its often crappy TV offerings. Instead, we've got the return of OLD crappy shows and new (possibly) crappy shows to look forward to. Like tonight, when Fox jumps the gun on all the other networks with its Fall season premieres of "Prison Break" and......

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

Was it just us, or did you also think, as soon as the Bay Bridge closed, that the only things you wanted to do over Labor Day Weekend were on the other side of the bay? Well, all those days are now nothing but a hazy memory, with the bridge reopening a full 11 hours earlier than planned (at around 6 p.m. last night) and traffic flowing relatively normally (i.e., jammed, but no more......

We were coming back from our Labor Day we're-outta-here yesterday and saw this over the hills to the north. It was big enough that we turned on the radio to make sure that nobody had bombed downtown San Jose. No terrorists here, but the Lick Fire is plenty scary on its own. Good luck to the firefighters who are trying to contain this beast.......

...And that's not even the curviest part! A car chase that started in Marin County around 3:00 a.m. Monday morning ended abruptly when the driver, speeding at around 75 mph over the Golden Gate Bridge, overshot the turn from Doyle Drive onto Lombard Street and flipped over. A open fifth of Hennessey was found in the car, and the passengers are in SF General with non-fatal injuries. Your SF Labor Day weekend homicide count: 3.......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

Since our trimethyldioxypurist is on the road for Labor Day, we're stepping in on the caffeine beat to pass along some sad news: Peet's Coffee founder Alfred Peet died earlier this week (Wednesday) in Oregon. Mr. Peet, born in Holland, opened the first Peet's at Walnut and Vine in Berkeley in 1966, and watched it spread nationwide (there's Peet's in New England now?). And the rumors you've heard about the Peet's/Starbucks connections are true: the......

We had a good time going through the recipes and eating stories in Street Food, the new book by wunderkind Tom Kine - that is, when we got over the insane jealousy. He got a book contract to travel for three months and eat all he could! How do we get something like that? We're excited to try his takes on bolani (Afghan flat bread) and Kadu (roast pumpkin paste), which he got from......

You know how the Bay Bridge is going to be closed on this Labor Day weekend? And how that means there'll be fewer car-trips into San Francisco? A reasonable person might assume that that'll mean an increased demand for public transit -- but Muni's response to that is, "reasonable people? What on Earth are those?" Not only is Muni not adjusting service levels to accommodate the bridge closure, they're actually reducing service levels on......

A warm spell is rolling into the Bay Area -- so it's time for our perennial post complaining about how much we haaaaaaate it when it's hot. Bring back the fog! Bring back the fog! So it's going to be stiflingly hot for the next few days (yes, we know, it's not as bad as it is in every other part of the country, but that's why we don't live in those other parts of......

-- Paranoia, feeding faux stories, and NYT's Laura Albert (AKA Miss Leroy) article. Depressing is right, Rita. [CultureBlog] -- Newsom defends Halloween shutdown. [BAR] -- San Francisco's other (but not nearly as stellar!) Matty. [BeyondChron] -- Pssst. We heard a rumor that the Bay Bridge will close during Labor Day Weekend. Pass it around. [511] -- Mandy Moore at the Fillmore. Eeeeeeeeee! [SF Weekly] -- SFBG's political art of the week. (Yay, Kool-Aid guy!)......

-- Michelangelo Antonioni dies; Mick LaSalle suspects Eric Rohmer will fade to black next. [Chron blogs] -- Chronicle wanted Gonzalez in the mayoral race. Alas. [BeyondChron] -- A baseball trader "shocker" happened involving the Giants. [Chron] -- Firefighters get raise. Hot. [Examiner] -- Murdoch to get WSJ. [Chron] -- Bay Bridge to shutdown during Labor Day weekend. Again. [Oakland Tribune] -- Overpass falls on FedEx truck and driver near Sacramento. [KGO7] -- CHP officer......

Remember way back to this spring when there was a Democratic primary? And that one guy who looked like Phil Rizzuto beat the Really Boring Guy to take on the Governator? Whatever happened to him? Yes, it's only been a few weeks into the main part of the campaign for Governor, that being after Labor Day, but questions are already being asked about whether Phil's campaign is either doomed or just F-----.. ...

Isn't everyone glad the Bay Bridge is reopened? Well, maybe not BART -- they're reporting a 13% increase in ridership over Labor Day weekend, including 10,200 riders who used the overnight service. Despite that promising-sounding 10,200, BART continues to say that it makes no financial sense to run BART 24 hours all the time; they say that it costs $300,000 to run the trains overnight, and they only made $30,000 on overnight fares this weekend.......

--The Bay Bridge lower deck is open again. --Immigration rallies for Labor Day. --Does Chris Daly want to run for the State Assembly? And who's going to run for mayor against Gavin? --Sun beats Dell. --is there a Bolinas sea monster? --And there's too many UC first-years. picture of an overflow intro chemistry class at Cal.......

As if the Cal Greeks didn't have enough to worry about with the undercover cops swarming in -- the ladies of Alpha Omicron Pi got an unpleasant surprise as they answered their door yesterday morning at 2:30 a.m. to a young man, who then died from a gunshot wound. The Berkeley police had received a tip that there might have been a shooting earlier that night at the site of the former Tower Records on......

In honor of Labor Day, we'd like to point out that every employee, freelancer and consultant in Silicon Valley has to bargain their health benefit terms on their own or take what the company offers, and many end up one of the 46 million Americans without. So this techie is rooting for Tom Ammiano to legislate health security, at least for San Franciscans. While individual entrepreneurial successes like the Mercury News' Matt "Silicon Beat" Marshall......

Look how cute these penguins are! In soberer news, we're all still in shock about the Ohmeed Popal SUV incidents on Tuesday. Our condolences go to the family of the man killed in Fremont, we hope for a speedy recovery for everyone who was injured, and we sincerely hope that Popal gets the help he desperately needs. In other news -- Josh Wolf is out of jail; he could probably still make it to Burning......

You know how everyone says San Francisco is a little bubble utopia isolated from the realities of the rest of the world? Well, you might as well embrace it this Labor Day, because the eastbound Bay Bridge is closed all weekend. Yes yes, you probably already know, since Caltrans has commissioned every single flashing road sign in the entire state to remind you for the last two weeks. We feel badly for any Amber Alert......

Hello on your puzzling adventures, Perplex puzzlers! We're hoping they lured you to our site out of your competitive spirit of gamesmanship, and we'll keep you with our obsessive coverage of most things Bay Area. SFist Jon braves the HTML wilds of table-formatting to serve up a heapful of truth about our local SF political scene. Quick, guess who this is: "Nice, affable, and completely ineffective. But we love the whole Gay Marriage thing." And......

When not performing Skinnerian experiments on us with the ever-increasing supply, yet less-than-expected demand for FasTrak lanes that makes weekend drives over the Bay Bridge look worse than rush hour, CalTrans is engaging in further operant conditioning by closing the Bay Bridge eastbound lanes over Labor Day Weekend. Convenient for vacationing tourists who intend to stay in SF, this closure is inconvenient for those of us who live in the Bay Area who enjoy the......

Four unrelated shootings in San Francisco over the long Labor Day weekend -- one at 24th and Alabama, one at Turk and Laguna, one at Harrison and 1st, and one in Visitacion Valley near the Cow Palace. Two victims are dead, two are in the hospital. PG&E announced that it figured out why that generator blew the other week underneath the Ralph Lauren store -- water leaked into the transformer, which caused an electrical short, which then blew up oil in the chamber used for insulation. Who uses oil for insulation? (Okay, engineers, enlighten us.) In other news, another transformer blew up on Market Street due to a failed cable splice, there was a power outage near UCSF when a tree blew into some power lines, and another outage in the Outer Mission when a car drove into a pole. And celebrating Labor Day the old-school way, 61 union members were arrested outside the Grand Hyatt at a sit-in over the year-long hotel strike. The union organizers have agreed to end the boycott against the Westin St. Francis because the WSF management has agreed to support several of the union's key demands. ...

There's a story -- a funny accident of history, actually -- that explains why there is always a copy of the latest New York Review of Books on the shelf next to the commode here at the Office of the SFist Ombudsman, but we focus instead a bit of text that appears on the contents page of every Review (one of the most earnest content engines in the country). The text reads: "Published 20......

That's right, SFist is getting on a plane early tomorrow and will be flying deep into the heart of Texas in order to bring you wall-to-wall reporting of the internerd/hipster fest that is South by Southwest. We really, really hope all those stories of Austin being "cool" and "hip" and, mostly, "liberal" are true -- we get scared of potential conflicts with Red Staters once we pass Pinole on 80. Can they see it......

So apparently the San Francisco school board held some public meetings to decide on the start of the new school year. Before Labor Day? After Labor Day? Decisions, decisions, decisions. Everyone was pretty much in agreeance agreement agreeance over starting school the week before Labor Day until several parents raised their objections. Turns out it would interfere with the start of Burning Man and well, the parents didn’t want readin’, ritin’ and rithmetic to get in the way of little Timmy and little Susie missing out on mud baths, raves, and art installations. While not official, the School Board is probably going to go with the pre-Labor Day opening....

After six weeks of fruitless negotiations, the San Francisco hotel workers union, UNITE 2, has called for a two-week strike, until October 13. The boycott is against the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group, which includes the Argent Hotel, the Hilton San Francisco, the Crowne Plaza Union Square and the Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental (SFist will be moving its staff meeting from the Top of the Mark). ...

SFist is obsessed with traffic (even though we no longer drive to work). It comes from the 18 months we worked in the middle of a salt marsh in a big cubicle box overlooking 101 North in Menlo Park. (SFist knew it was time to quit that job when we started hoping for accidents on the way down so we could get to work that much later.) Like real estate and the NASDAQ, South Bay traffic is monitored closely as a proxy for the economic boom and bust cycle -- although oddly enough, traffic patterns appear to have no actual correlation with anything other than that one guy driving 40 in the fast lane....

If your weekend was anything like our weekend, you spent three days mewling like a kitten about the heat and canceling all plans to go anywhere at all. Not these four SFSU students -- Gil Hackel (singer-songwriter), Nate Maas (cinema major), Trammell Scruggs (sound engineering major), and Zhenya Warshawsky (literature major) -- who launched and completed their Labor Day Weekend mission -- to ride every single MUNI bus line from end to end. Its name: Operation MuniCon....