Our next big SFist contest is for "An Evening of a Thousand Scowls" a comedy show put on by everyone's favorite writers workshop, 826 Valencia. The night features such comedians as Janeane Garofalo, Patton Oswalt, Al Madrigal, Jasper Redd, Brent Weinbach and others, and will be hosted by non-comedian Daniel Handler (aka “Lemony Snicket”). The performance will raise money for 826 Valencia's student writing and tutoring programs. ...

A passel of literary events tonight: LitPAC & Laughing Liberally Lab-SF Present a benefit for Slain Iraqi Comedian Walid Hassan featuring renowned writers Daniel Handler of Lemony Snicket, Andrew Sean Greer of Confessions of Max Tivoli, Michelle Tea of Valencia and Rent Girl, plus comedians, Joe Klocek, Sal Calanni of sketch group Tossing Alice, Ali Mafi of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, Samantha Chanse, Kurt Weitzmann and more. The benefit will be hosted......

Hope you're having a bad-luck-free Friday the 13th out there, folks! Here's the ominous items we found on a casual search of San Francisco news sites. --Weird screwup on the highways today -- due to a software glitch, eleven Bay Area road signs were flashing the message "two lanes closed for construction," when in fact all the relevant lanes were open. At least it wasn't flashing an Amber Alert with your car's license plate number,......

We headed to Cafe Du Nord last Friday to catch the sold-out early show by Emily Haines and The Soft Skeleton. By the 9pm showtime, the band was still soundchecking behind closed curtains and didn't start playing to the crowd until an hour later, but it was worth the wait. Haines crouched behind the keys, bird-skinny and soft-voiced, embodying the delicate yin to her animated Metric persona's yang. Eerie old black and white film clips......

--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......

You, the voracious reader, will soon be left to repine most piteously, for a most sorrowful event is pending. Yes! Local author Lemony Snicket's final book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, titled The END, is being released next month. The final volume to this terrible collection will no doubt fill the reader with terror, pity and sorrow once they learn the final fates of the unlucky Baudelaire orphans. Worse - there will be no......

In a shameless bit of self-reference, we will announce that it's our birthday, and we have therefore been the happy recipient of more than one Amazon gift certificate over the course of the day. We're not the kind of a**hole who complains about a gift (shut up, we're not!), but we did have a moment of crisis: how do we reconcile our sincere and public support of our fine local independent bookstores with the......

We've always wanted to call something or someone "a delightful romp," and now's our chance. Rechristened "Magical Dog" by certain members of the SFist community, Sergeant Pepper is the story of Felix -- a young boy with no interest in forming human friends -- and a dog, Sergeant Pepper, who comes into Felix's life and who can (joy of joys for a small child) talk. There follows a fairly boiler-plate story with concerned parents; a......

Wow, so much interesting list stuff has hit our inbox this week that we've barely had time to read our online reserves from the SFPL. Well, we've learned that if we're running behind on our reading, that booksfree, (which should just give up and call themselves the Netflix of books, because that's what they are) is there to help save us from late fees on borrowed books. Then again, if we have some cash......

SFist loves local magazines, from Bitch to Other to Dwell. (And before all you "Wavefans" from the same IP address write in, the answer is "no".) We're so happy to welcome The Skinny, a new Bay Area publication, to the mix. According to their site "The Skinny is a quarterly guide to the San Francisco Bay Area that caters to an underserved group of residents and visitors between the ages of 18 and 34,......