Net Neutrality Symposium at USF...

We caught Phil Setzer, the violinist for the Emerson String Quartet, being driven down between performances in Santa Barbara and Orange County. We hope it was in a stretch limo, as these guys have won eight Grammy awards and critical acclaim everywhere they go. They are the only chamber music group to ever win a best classical album grammy, and they even got two. So they better travel like the rock stars they are. They'll......

-- Laura Gibson: We'd hate to genre-ize her lovely sounds, but neo-folk songstress Gibson -- who uses such tools as trumpet, viola, and musical saw in addition to her sublime vocal cords-- sings delicate siren songs that will have you crashing at her feet. She performs along with Musee Mechanique (Portland) and Snowblink starting at 8 p.m. at Rickshaw Stop; $8. -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti: You know the man, the legend, the poet, the beret......

The 49ers venture into the wilds of Jersey this Sunday to war with the New York American football Giants....

Bad day on the transportation front yesterday: so someone got stabbed on a MUNI bus yesterday afternoon around 1 p.m. at 16th Street and Mission, and on the morning commute, southbound 880 near Hayward was completely snarled after people discovered body parts all over the highway. Turns out a person walking on the highway was hit by several cars early in the morning. And on Wednesday night, an AC Transit bus was in a seven-car......

"I am not gay. I never have been gay," lisped Republican Idaho Senator Larry Craig, with his beard wife, Suzanne, by his side. After getting arrested by an undercover office in a Minneapolis airport boy's room for engaging "in actions 'often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct,'" the GOP senator plead guilty to a disorderly conduct charge, with the hope that it would all quietly go away. Well, it......

After Supervisor Sandoval introduced a resolution to brand hyperbolic grandpa Michael Savage as a hate speech-spewing loon, it wasn't voted on unanimously yesterday, care of SFsit's favorite coverboy, Ed Jew. (Ah, World Net Daily, where we go to get all of our fair and balanced news, drizzled with a infusion of organic Nazism.) On July 5, after Savage predictably asked that students undergoing a weeklong fast for immigration reform (and, bonus, to slim down......

The way Wired's Noah Shachtman sees things struck us as astonishingly clear and pragmatic in reference to the Lawrence Livermore lab's partnership with Texas A&M....

-- Guns-for-gift card trade today at Civic Center. [Chron] -- How will Giants' owner Peter Magowan celebrate the moment Bonds makes the hit? [Examiner] -- Rebecca Schaeffer's stalker cum murderer stabbed 11 times in prison. Ouch. [Chron, Examiner, via AP] -- SJ hit-and-run suspect still at large. [KPIX] -- Lawrence Livermore Labs plan for more uranium blasts. Yikes! [IndyBay] -- Free Wi-Fi in SF? [The Register]......

-- Greg Behrendt: SF-native, author of He's Just Not That into You (comfortingly known to many a confused single gal as a symptom of Peter-Pan Syndrome), and comedian takes a break from his talk show to make you snicker/slap your knee. The sheer hilarity starts at 8 p.m. at Cobb’s Comedy Club, 915 Columbus; tickets are $25. -- Blur, "Transgender & Gender Variant" Support Group: Pretty much what it says right there; a good place......

You know how they say the most effective ad uses the words FREE SEX NOW? Well, that's what we've got! We've got passes to the smuttily-highbrow Lady Chatterley, a French movie based on D.H. Lawrence's second draft of what would ultimately become Lady Chatterley's Lover, called "John Thomas and Lady Jane." The movie's won five Cesar awards (the French Oscars) -- plus it sounds like there's plenty of steamy activity as well, given that it's......

A gay African-American high school English teacher at the private Urban School is recovering from three stab wounds he received a few weeks ago while eating at the Taqueria Cancun down near Mission and 29th Street. A woman came into the taqueria and started yelling racial and anti-gay slurs at people in the restaurant, and when the teacher and his friends tried to get away from her, she attacked him with the knife. The SFPD......

First bedbugs, then crack addicts, then bone-rattling noise -- that's the sort of bad-neighboring up with which Tenderloin residents will not put. Residents of the Lawrence Hotel have been scowling for a long time now at the deafening noise generated by Club Six -- check out these complaints. Shaking windows and floors, people on medication for sleep deprivation due to noise, doors left illegally open, and crowds so big on the sidewalk that you......

A bunch of stuff formerly belonging to a longtime road manager of the Grateful Dead's, Lawrence "Ram Rod" Shurtliff, will be up for auction starting today. Rudson Shurtliff is selling his father's guitars, gold records, and more at auction house Bonhams Butterfields -- the auction will be held online starting at 10 a.m. tomorrow....

For all you E-Bay fanatics out there, better start checking because someone done gone stole a Nobel Prize from UC Berkeley. The prize, won by late physicist Ernest O. Lawrence in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron, was taken last Tuesday from the locked glass case it was held in. As of right now, there are no suspects but whoever gets caught (if they get caught) will be up for grand theft charges. ...

Here's what's opening this week: Wild Hogs About four wannabe bikers who stumble into a chapter of Hell’s Angels, the film looks like an updated (and not-so-yuppie) retelling of City Slickers. Wild Hogs features Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence, John Travolta and William H. Macy. A huge event for the Chinese “Year of the Pig” saw all four of the film’s stars in some sort of parade on the Embarcadero. There were supposed to be floats-- and motorcycles, of course. We hear you couldn’t pay press to attend. Let's hope the same can't be said of the movie. ...

We come back from Second Fake Question Time and.... WHERE'S GAVINWATCH???? Emails to the anonymous blogger/videohounds' gmail account were bouncing, their YouTubes clips were gone, and their website had crashed. What th---? It wasn't like Blogger was down, and even if it were, why would that affect the gmail and the YouTubes? Mysterious, we thought. Then we went out for dinner with some friends. Well, in the time between that and now when we're......

SFist's beloved A-list photographer Drew Altizer sends along the pictures he took from today's "Wild Hogs"/ Chinese New Year event. We haven't heard a word about this movie before, but it apparently involves Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, and William H. Macy as four guys on a midlife crisis motorcycle tour of New Mexico? (Did we read this press release right? Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, and William H. Macy?) Huh. Anyways,......

Cars Grotto Nights presents Driving Obsession, a free night of reportage, science, and art in the form of a subversive Valentine to our cars at Mezzanine (444 Jessie St at Mint). This cabaret-style variety show features Bucky Sinister reading his show-stopping poem on NASCAR, Dr. Graham Fleming of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory explaining how he and others are using synthetic biology to create fuels for the future, Baghdad taxi driver/art student Mounaf Shaker's screens his......

It may have been a tough football season, but they were dancing down on The Farm last night.

In fact, they might still be dancing at center court in Maples Pavilion, savoring the Cardinal's 75-68 upset of third-ranked UCLA.

Despite not being ranked, the Cardinal have been lurking in the weeds all season, and Sunday night they reared up and took a bite out of the Bruins. The way that they won it was especially startling: rallying back from a 17-point first-half deficit to cut the lead to seven in the second half, then going on a 15-0 run over the next three and one-half minutes to take the lead for good. They shot 70 percent from the floor in the second half! Stanford coach Trent Johnson showed great coaching chops by moving swingman Lawrence Hill to power forward in the second half to negate UCLA's quickness, and Hill responded with 22 points.

At the behest of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a piazza that will take up a block of Vallejo street is in the plans for 2007. The piazza will be located on Vallejo Street between Columbus and Grant, by the St. Francis of Assisi. If we can remember our North Beach geography through our fuzzy, alcohol drenched memories of North Beach, that's right by Busters (home of yummy Cheese Steaks) and Caffe Trieste. The piazza will include benches, trees and a "starving poets podium" for, well, starving poets. If we can remember our geography through our fuzzy, alcohol drenched memories, isn't there something like that in London? Says Tony Gartner, the president of the North Beach Merchants Association a nice restful place for "people to come and rest their souls." ...

If you've been as disappointed with "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" as we have, then you might be approaching the similarly-themed sitcom "30 Rock," which premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on NBC, with a bit of trepidation. If a so-called "master" like Aaron Sorkin can't write a compelling show about the backstage antics of a late night comedy program, how could a mere "SNL" alum like Tina Fey do any better? Well, we're......

We had a great time at the Between the Bridges reading/concert on Friday night and got all excited about the upcoming week. So what else is out there in Litquake World? ...

-Arnie meets Angelides for a debate and nothing really exciting happens. We wanted to watch it, really, but we watched Friday night's "Battlestar Galactica" instead....

We knew we should have saved the dead llama story for just one more day -- it's time for another Animal Roundup! Kids and parents are freaking out in Mountain View, as the squirrels in Cuesta Park go on the attack! Over the last three months, three people have been bitten by the aggressive rodents, which are becoming desperate for food after the installation of anti-squirrel trash cans in the park. Check out this paragraph......

--Why's Lawrence Wong getting in so much trouble for accidentally crossing a picket line when the Bay Area Reporter did too? --The Stanford Band frets about its future. --The SF hip-hop dancer (Allan) from the first season of So You Think You Can Dance supports Krissy Keefer. --Maggie Lynch compares MUNI to Lemony Snicket. --Skip school, go to jail. --More cops in North Beach. Why aren't there more cops in the Western Addition? --Pat Murphy......

Those season premieres are trickling in, with the big gusher arriving next week. We'll try to come to you daily next week with coverage and (hopefully) some actual reviews of pilots, but for this week we offer a slightly briefer rundown. "Monday Night Football" premieres on ESPN tonight, but if you're someone who watches football, you already know this, so that's all that needs to be said about that. This being the fifth anniversary......

Over the weekend we were flipping through the TV and came upon the old classic sci-fi flick, The Andromeda Strain, that movie from the 70's about dangerous microbes causing death and destruction and the end of the world in ways only movies from the early 70's could. Good thing, we thought to ourselves, we didn't have to worry about it. So naturally, this morning, we checked out the Examiner's web site only to see that a court hearing has been set over the Bush administration wanting to put a biodefense lab at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. LOL! ...

Eric Rice posts the transcript of Lawrence Lessig's recent chat in Second Life, which could just be the most meta-geek thing ever. Niall Kennedy, Caterina Fake and Josh Kinberg build an ego-bot for bloggers, Whuffie Tracker, in just a few hours. Sex.com sells for $14 million -- after the legal fees, there might just be enough to take the family to In-N-Out. And wondered why that new Apple ad looked like an old Postal......

SFGate Culture blog beat us to this story (damn, that Aidan Vazari), but the National Coalition for the Homeless recently put together a list of the meanest cities to the homeless and San Francisco came in eleventh. You know, the other night while we were walking the gauntlet on 16th between Mission & Valencia and trying to navigate between a passed out drunk lying in a pool of piss and a drunk couple yelling at each other at the top of the lungs, we were just thinking about how mean we were to the homeless. ...