WoW Player Meet-up -- in RL!: If you didn't see the South Park episode or ever stumble upon the Big Blue Dress video while browsing YouTube at 3 am, you're way behind. World of Warcraft, with 8 million gamers subscribed internationally, is a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) affectionately known as Warcrack throughout the gaming community. We won't bore you ... ahem, trouble you with the nitty gritty (not that we would know about......

Before we get into it -- ding ding ding! Envision a scantily-clad lady with a placard reading Round Three! Alt-weekly fight! If this were a schoolyard, we'd all be surrounding the SFBG and the Weekly in a circle. The Weekly lunges! And the SFBG throws a punch back! Oooooh! (Online only -- and geez Louise, the Weekly's essay is loooooong. We got a cramp in our mouse finger scrolling down.) Okay, onto the actual weeklies. Last week's winner (who's featuring last week's cover on its website), the Guardian. Dude, we are so not prepared for a Katrina-type disaster. Cover article: nuclear power is bad. Hats! If the restaurant Maverick were in your neighborhood, you'd be a lucky person. People complain about their, um, endowments. And oh yeah, we threw out some shiny insert about food. The Weekly: Matt Smith in rare form, on various humiliations visited on the white race by SF last week. The Chron's Burning Man coverage is only the beginning of the Smith attack! The Infiltrator tries to get his cat cloned. Tommy Craggs on the new A's stadium (lots of diagrams). Meredith Brody's father reminisces about his dinner with Kinsey (no number on the scale revealed.) OK Then on anti FEMA music. Canada, the new Montreal! And the Bouncer goes to the Lone Palm. After the jump: The East Bay Express, the Metro, and the pick of the week....

We'd like to point out that our fair state's evil anti-smoking laws have finally struck the Lone Palm -- we were told no more smoking last night. Almost makes us wanna move to a nice, tolerant red state where we can smoke and drink away our sense of impending doom like a normal human being. We had two new weekly features debut this week - the Trimethyldioxypurist will be bringing you slightly jittery thoughts......

A weekly whiskey-stained, slurred-spoken ode to joy upon the bar scene of San Francisco by Andrew Lowder. Webster's defines 'Swanky' as "Ostentatious and fashionably elegant". Nine nights out of ten, I avoid those concepts like a meet and greet at a leper colony, but every once in awhile, like when those not blessed enough to live here are visiting, you just gotta pull out all the stops and pretend that you live the swanky lifestyle......