And a day before BART Rider Appreciation, no less? Sad. Yesterday, at around 1:20 p.m. near Apgar Street and Martin Luther King Jr. in Oakland, a 20-year-old man was shot and killed, and an 18-year-old seriously injured, after "being shot on the street near the MacArthur BART station." Police aren't sure why Nathan Taylor or Donte Davis, respectively, were gunned down, but if you know anything, spill it to the police at 510-238-3821.......

23rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Labor and Community Breakfast this morning at the San Francisco Hilton...

Merry Martin Luther King Jr. Day. [Examiner, Nature abhors a vacuum, SF Bay View, Beyond Chron]The TLDR spat between SF Bay Guardian and SF Weekly continues at a steady, confusing pace. [SFBG, Weekly]Voter registration deadline is tomorrow, kids. [SF Gate]Metallica's Kirk Hammett's Divisadero Street manse is still for sale. [Examiner]Facebook will get an executive chef, but workers might have to pay for their meals. How devastating. [Valleyvag]Temperatures drop . As does some snow. [Mercury......

Conceited much? This year's abortion bash, Walk for Life-West Coast, will take place tomorrow, Jan 19, on the lawn area of Justin Herman Plaza down by the Embarcadero from 10:30 a..m. to 1:30 p.m. And we can't wait! What are you going to wear? We're going to sport our beaver fur-trimmed coat, because...well, we're sure there's a smug murder joke in there somewhere. But if you're able to get up that early on a Saturday......

Oh dear. Just days after Brian Austin was stabbed to death at 47th Avenue and Fulton Street, a (homelss!) man was shot yesterday in Golden Gate Park. According to the fuzz, he took a hit at 25th Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive, a little after 11 p.m. No arrests have been made. As for the victim, he is in stable condition. Golden Gate Park? Not so much.......

If it’s as beautiful and warm as everyone says it will be this Sunday, then we’re headed to the Thai Buddhist Temple in Berkeley for the Sunday brunch. We haven’t been in awhile, and we’ve been craving that Mango Sticky Rice. Brunch in general is not usually our thing -- the long wait to get seated for an over-priced generic egg scramble usually makes our tender hangovers worse and not better. But the brunch at Wat Mongkolratanaram in Berkeley does not disappoint. It’s a weekly fundraiser for the temple. For around $5, you can get a tasty and pretty authentic Thai meal, including their delicious mango sticky rice for dessert. ...

* Bay Area Wanderer: Near Martin Luther King Drive and Lincoln, San FranciscoAhh, it is nice to have the sun back with us.Couples holding hands. Kids frolicking underneath eucalyptus trees. Picnics.Springtime... is that you?......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

SFist reviews Comedy Death-Ray at SF's Sketchfest ...

Hey, the new MUNI T Third line is finally open! That's the new light rail route that goes (.gif) from Castro Station down Third Street, through Dogpatch, down the Bayview, past Monster Park, and all the way to Sunnydale Avenue. We decided to spend our day off today checking it out. The T-Third is running in beta from now until April 1-- it's only running on weekends and every twenty minutes (though we waited about......

A few photos of the MLK Breakfast at the S.F. Hilton, Monday morning, 1/15/07...

It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day which means some of you are working and some of you aren't working. We're guessing more of you are working than not working so a whole lot of you are bitter while the rest of you are probably still asleep right now....

-Fire at the Richmond refinery scares the crap out of a lot of people. -It's still cold out there. -Why did the T-Third line take so long to be ready? Matier & Ross have the answers. -Stanford releases a whole bunch of writings by Martin Luther King Jr. -Fog City Journal has the preliminary Democratic State Central Committee (DSCC) Election results......

What were we thinking? With Martin Luther King day approaching, it dawned on us that we missed our big chance, that blessed time between Christmas and New Year when we can actually take off for three weeks without using up all our paid vacation for the year. So what are we to do when our tanned co-workers rave about drinking margaritas on the Mayan riviera? Well for us, there is Blue Heaven Imports. ...

Congressional Candidates for San Francisco's lesser parties-- Green, Libertarian and Republican held a press conference yesterday to highlight Nancy Pelosi's refusal to debate them. Or do pretty much anything to acknowledge their existence like responding to letters. The press conference featured Krissy Keefer (Green Party), Philip Berg (Libertarian Party) and Mike DeNunzio (Republican Party) and was held in front of the federal building. Instead of attending, Pelosi sent an aide with a letter to the meeting, which was read out loud. The letter basically said Pelosi was too busy campaigning elsewhere to campaign in the city she represents. You know, we'd pay to see a Keefer/Pelosi debate, especially if they let Keefer bring the Taiko drums. ...

The battle over lap dances in strip clubs moved to the Entertainment Commission last Friday as they held an often contentious, standing-room-only hearing on the issue. During the meeting, strippers, err "exotic dancers," testified in front of the commission to say that the proposed new rules, that calling for the ending of private rooms and booths and it's possible ending of lap dancing, could impede their ability to make money. In our minds, the testimony was given like something out of "Hot for Teacher" in which the moment the dancer got up to the podium, they tore their clothes off to reveal slinky lingerie underneath, but we have a feeling things didn't happen that way (BTW, while searching for the "Hot For Teacher" clip we also stumbled upon a bootleg video of VH doing it live in an outdoor concert in 1984 and it is awesome). Oh well. Also testifying in support of the legislation were local Bay Area rappers who claimed that no more lap dances in strip clubs would hurt their ability to "be gangsta." ...

very once in awhile, we like to visit the other side as it were and cruise through the world of conservative blogs. Oh, the fun one can have at gawking at the alternate reality they live in, where the Stones, the Who and the Sex Pistols are stalwart conservative rockers, where Global Warming is some paranoid hysteria dreamed up by a bunch of tree huggers, and our President is a Great American Hero. Lately, we've discovered that their newest object of wrath is Google. Why? Because you know how Google always comes up with those cute little icons on holidays that they paste on their page? Well, they had no icon for Memorial Day. ...

It's part of the Politician Rulebook that for Martin Luther King Day, the politician goes to find some civil rights type group, gives a speech in which they give a bunch of homilies in praise of the good Dr., says there's still a lot of work to do, then goes back to not doing anything to accomplish any of it. Which is what Herr Governator did this Martin Luther King Day: he gave a speech at a labor-sponsored Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast in San Francisco. It didn't go over very well...

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! Did you know that America's "first black Millionaire" was Yerba Buena resident Alexander Leidesdorff? Eric Meyerson got a chance to see Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter at a recent book signing. And the wheels of the criminal justice system continue to squeak, with this harrowing tale of dealing with the Fremont courts. We'll take a trip around the blogosphere for a minute. Jon "PJ" Swenson at the Sharkspage does......

Saturday: The only event for us is the IndieFest Benefit Party. Join our lucky pass winners, plus SFists Jackson, Eve, Rain and maybe (if we all beg her in the comments) Rita as we get our first look at what they're gonna be showing us at IndeiFest, as well as hear some great bands and DJs. It's all happening at the Rickshaw Stop at 8 p.m. Sunday: We're heading over to the Oakland Scottish......

We have mixed emotions about Diane B. "Dede" Wilsey's pet cause, the new M. H. de Young Memorial Museum building. For years the antics surrounding that concourse -- museums moving, buildings being torn down, garages built -- have provided pages and pages of entertainment in the local press. More recently, the unfinished structure loomed darkly over John F. Kennedy drive like an aircraft carrier that somehow made it inland from Ocean Beach (and we're......

The on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again fight over the parking garage for the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park is back on following a lawsuit and rally protesting plans to create a southern entrance to the now-being built parking garage, the most controversial aspect of which is the proposal for turning Martin Luther King Drive into a four-lane road from it's current two-lane-ness. The additional two lanes would be for MUNI and garage access only. Unlike......

Just a few minutes ago, Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow published an excerpt and link to a Toronto Globe and Mail article that describes how a classic documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize, can no longer be sold or broadcast because the filmmakers, including John Else of Cal Berkeley's school of journalism, can't afford to re-up all the usage fees for the copyrighted material the film uses to illustrate it's story.......

We're on a lighter posting schedule today in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. -- we hope you have the day off to spend at a number of Bay Area celebrations scheduled for today. (If you don't get the day off, spend all day playing Public Enemy really, really loud). In San Francisco, the MLK parade will begin at 11:30 at the Fourth and King Street when the "Freedom Train" pulls into the Caltrain station, and goes up Third Street, down Market, and ends at Civic Center Plaza. Starting at 12:30, Representative Barbara Lee will speak, and local American Idol finalist LaToya London will perform. Dr. King advocated racial justice, most famously in his I Have A Dream speech in 1963, and was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. Keep the dream alive. ...

Tonight, economist, columnist, and professor Paul Krugman will speak in conversation with longtime journalist and KPFA radio host Larry Bensky in a benefit for KPFA and Pacifica Radio. The event is at 8pm in the auditorium of Martin Luther King Middle School (1781 Rose Street in Berkeley)....