Timecapsule: November 18, 1865 Mark Twain's improbable wild west tale about an inveterate gambler and a jumping frog becomes the talk of New York City. Mark Twain -- or, let's use the name his mother gave him -- Samuel Clemens was not much of a miner. Up in the rainy foothills of the Sierra Nevada gold country, he preferred sitting around the camp tavern stove and listening to local characters tell tall tales. Now, a......

Timecapsule: October 15, 1863 The first Cliff House opened its doors on this date 145 years ago. The brainchild of a real estate speculator and a State Senator, this first of umpteen incarnations was a simple white clapboard affair. Despite its external modesty, it was a high-class joint, and quickly became the most fashionable destination in town. Presidents Ulysses Grant and Rutherford B Hayes would number among its many distinguished guests over the years, but......

Hal Holbrook in "Mark Twain Tonight": Julia Sugarbaker's husband and Oscar nominee for this year's Into the Wild, Broadway veteran Hal Holbrook won a Tony Award in 1966 for playing satirical American writer in this performance, and he's been doing it ever since. This one-man show draws on observations taken from Twain's own material. A real treat for admirers of American literature. The show starts tonight at 8 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center......

The wildfire raging up near Lake Tahoe reminded us of our dear old cousin Mark. Mark Twain, that is, and what we remembered was his own brush with accidental arson up Tahoe way. It's a little-known fact, if "fact" be something that can safely ascribed to Twain's baroquely embellished reminiscences of his years out West, that he was solely responsible for a horrendous forest fire on the shores of Lake Tahoe. It was 1861,......

It's going to be hot, and we hate it. We hate it when it's hot in San Francisco!! We did not move to this city for 75 degree weather!! Temps are expected to hit the mid-70s this afternoon through the rest of the week, and tomorrow should be "good beach weather" (meaning, of course, utter and total misery for us in the hoodie plus shirt plus layering t-shirt underneath posse.) Water.... water....! Fortunately, the......

"Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat. " - Mark Twain By SFist Elaine......

It's almost exactly fifty years later, and it still smacks you upside your beret-wearing cool-cat bongo-beating head, man -- Allan Ginsberg debuted his classic poem "Howl" on Friday, October 7, 1955, at a jam-packed Six Gallery on Fillmore Street. His passionate reading brought tears to the eyes of the crowd, and is widely viewed as having kick-started the SF Beat Movement of the 1950s. On the actual day of (which coincidentally is also a Friday), Howl publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti's a href="http://www.citylights.com">bookstore and literary festival are sponsoring a Howl Redux, where they'll play film footage of Ginsberg himself reading Howl. Afterwards, contemporary San Francisco area writers will read the works of other revolutionary San Francisco area writers (so Daniel Handler is reading Gertrude Stein, Jerry Brown is reading Jack London, and Armistead Maupin is reading Mark Twain, among others. Pick up tickets here. ...

We were a little slow to pick up on this sad note. Seems that Betsy Culp has decided to turn out the lights over the San Francisco Call. The call has existed in some form in The City since the days of Mark Twain, but in the 21st century it was very much "The Washerwoman's Paper" online. Betsy explains: This spring, however, I came to realize that decades of hunching over first a hot......