An update on news about the oil spill ...

Stephen Kellogg & the Sixers (a band with a breakfast cereal/basketball name - catchy, right?) have started their Dirty Ol' Fall Tour on the West Coast, starting in Long Beach, then L.A. and tonight in San Francisco at Cafe du Nord. At the beginning of December, they will end up in their hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts playing two final shows at Iron Hall Music Hall. Playing over 300 shows in the last two years Stephen......

Today is, of course, Selection Sunday, the best day of the year for college basketball fans. But not necssarily so of Stanford fans as their chances of making it to the Tourney went down, down, down over the past couple of days. The Merc has a primer for today's fun. -Everbody loves the 49ers free agent moves. -Today's "the Warriors just might make the playoffs story" from the Merc. -Milton Bradley tries to preach the......

Clip in sports fans, between the weather and the Amgen Tour of California (TOC), it's going to be a great weekend for cycling in the Bay Area.

Whether you're tackling Mt.Tam on your Saturday morning club ride or comparing yourselves to the pros with a summit of Stage 3's infamous Sierra Hill climb, pack the sunscreen today and leave the rain shell behind.

On Sunday at 1:00 p.m., the TOC starts with the prologue, a 3.0 kilometer time trial from the Ferry building to Coit Tower.

That's right Cutters, the Italians are coming, along with the French, the Spaniards, the Americans, the Germans, the Dutch-- yeah, even the Dutch. They're all going to be in the City this weekend to compete in this year's Amgen Tour of California.

We're talking the real deal. This isn't some club-level Saturday morning crit for free tubes at the local bike shop (no offense), this it the best road cyclists in the world, competing for top-tier elite international cycling teams like Discovery Channel, CSC, T-Mobile, Rabobank, and more, in serious competition.

Get out the Kibbles and Bits -- UK prime minister Tony Blair, widely derided as Bush's "poodle" for his unhesitating support of the questionable Iraq war, is making an unannounced visit to the Bay Area this weekend. It'll be the first ever visit by a sitting British prime minister to the state of California. (What, Maggie Thatcher never made it out here?) Blair gets out here today, is having dinner on Saturday with George and......

This past weekend we made our way down to Long Beach for the Abu Dhabi Combat Club Submission Wrestling World Championships. A competition between the best submission wrestlers, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practioners, and Judo players in the world, the combatants win by submission, points or referee decision. Drawing a diverse crowd, we found ourselves thisclose to BJJ fan and studentJoe Rogan, and we hear Julia Roberts fan and student Jason Patric was also in the......

First MUNI announced they wanted to raise fares. Then Caltrain hopped on board the fare raising train (ha! we made a pun). And now BART. Why, raising fares is the new black. Thanks to the usual assortment of reasons- budget shortfalls, rising employee benefits, mismanagement- BART is now facing a budget deficit of $53 million dollars. Unlike MUNI, the BART Board doesn't want to cut service, but is proposing a combination fare hikes, cutting discounts to children and seniors, staff layoffs, and raising parking fees. Oh, and introducing valet service at some of the more popular parking lots. Yes, valet services and no, that doesn't sound elitist at all. At a meeting last week, BART directors heard from the horde of angry commuters who raised the fairly decent point that with gas prices so high, raising fares to make BART prohibitively more expensive might not be the smartest thing to do (maybe it's because we only got a C in economics, but if there's a belief that lowering prices can increase profits by making it cheaper for people to buy things and crack dealers often sell their crack at a low cost to get more people hooked, wouldn't that also be true of public transportation? Like if you lower fares, maybe more people would ride and more money would be brought in? But what do we know?) The Board of Directors pretty much shrugged their shoulders in response. ...

It's the Big Game this weekend! Guess who's not excited about it? ...