(By Joe Kukura) We just got off the phone with Carol Queen, who is gripped in preparations for this Sunday’s seventh annual Masturbate-a-Thon – where good folks publicly drop trou and raise money by seeing who can masturbate the longest, climax most often, and ejaculate the furthest. Things are really coming together for Sunday’s proceedings, with your hosts Nina Hartley and SF Boylesque, and live performances by Madison Young, Tom Orr, Sadie Lune, and......

(By Eyleen Tavy) After a disturbingly easy commute, no line at Blue Bottle, and 15 minutes spent deleting the zillions of Out of Office emails that cluttered our inbox, we're ready to face the day. And, in the words of that damned Carrie Bradshaw, we had to wonder just who is at work today? We know why we're here (absent boss, parsimonious with vacation days, Bagel Radio's 480 Minutes sounds better on our office......

We know: you're stuck at work and want to go home. Get this weekend started. Or are already dreading the melancholia you'll feel come Monday night knowing that the three-day weekend is over. Relax. Here's a brief list of things to do that don't involve you going out of town (because, really, the City is at its best during three-say weekends; everyone leaves): Carnaval (Mission; fiesta, forever), Opera in the Park (Dolores Park; arias,......

139th Annual Memorial Day in S.F....

--Carnaval went well! --Jack Daly for mayor! Quote of the day: "Daddy, this party is no fun. Let's go to another party." Don't all the progressives say that? Bonus tidbit: Sarah Daly says there is no way Chris is running. --Fanime convention video. --What's going on with that Real Foods abandoned space on 24th Street? --Those whales finally got out of Sacramento and into the Bay Area (and are thus now fair game for......

SFist gives away tickets and album for Voxtrot at Great American Music Hall on 5/30/07...

Happy Memorial Day! Here's some stuff to do if you're not barbecuing. Hey, remember that interview that SFist Rain did with Mystery Science Theater 3000's Mike Nelson last week, about his new project, Rifftrax? Download an .mp3 of the MST3K folks and play it while watching its corresponding mainstream movie! GENIUS. Well, you can see Mike yourself at RiffTrax Live tonight -- they won't say what movie's going to be screening (all we've got is......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

Well, you could either go to Carnaval this weekend -- or you could go to the State Green Party Convention. Ross Mirkarimi (seen here going into the dunk tank) is giving the keynote address, and the delegates plan to debate issues like ranked-choice voting, lowering the voting age to 17, and immigration. They may also get to issues about global warming. The convention starts at 11:30 a.m., goes through the Memorial Day weekend and is......

It's Memorial Day, so it must be time for Carnaval! The two-day multicultural festival on 17th and Harrison, filled with big headdresses, drums, and tasty-smelling food! (note to self: is our car parked near there? Better move it.) This year's theme is LOVE HAPPENS, and, as you can see in the above YouTube clip, this year's Carnaval King and Queen can really shake it! It's an action-packed two days: Saturday is the festival, with......

--They are going to reopen the Macarthur Maze by Memorial Day weekend! That construction company totally deserves their $5 million bonus. --We know why Chris Daly interrupted Newsom's meeting with the Venezuelan ambassador! To tell Gavin there's another Daly on the way! Congratulations, Chris and Sarah! --Someone died at Bay to Breakers. --The city may try to move Halloween to behind AT&T Park. --They're going to try and get Wi-Fi on BART. --Condoleeza Rice is......

--There were more bikes than cars on Market Street today for Bike To Work Day. Soon we will realize our dream where every car driver is assigned an individual biker to yell at them with a camera in hand. --Better to be biking to work than on MUNI -- as some of you reported to us, there was a massive meltdown in the tunnel this morning when the computer system crashed. Maggie Lynch says......

While some consider Memorial Day the official start of summer, we know it is marked by a different occasion: the premiere of crappy summer TV shows! While last week was a nice little vacation from TV slavedom, complete with even more deletions from the TiVo Season Pass list, those empty spots are quickly getting filled up. Let's see what the evening has to offer, shall we? Tonight is devoted to slightly nightmarish plastic surgery-laden......

Last Monday, after we posted our blog round-up, we, along with what we can only assume was all of America, went outside and tried to start a fire. It was Memorial Day, which means the start of summer, which means the start of bar-be-cu'ing season. (What is the correct conjugation of "Bar-be-cue" anyways? Does it exist? Or are there multiple versions, like its spelling?) In any event, we tried to grill. It did not......

Getting ready for Tuesday's election? Study up on our handy-dandy chart of the gubernatorial candidates or our five-second summary of all the state and San Francisco propositions. Or pick sides in Ma v. Ja! And if your favorite candidate loses, well, he or she can always become a filmmaker instead. Free free free! A free Madame Butterfly performance, free We Are Scientists tickets, free readings, a free baseball, free stuff on Craigslist, and free......

An early morning fire on Market and 10th Street in San Francisco is now safely out, but a fire battalion chief suffered non-threatening injuries to his shoulder when he fell through a floor of the burning building. Market Street was closed for three hours, but has reopened to traffic now. Those of you driving across the Bay Bridge this weekend, don't forget to take a copy of today's Chronicle with you, which lovingly diagrams out......

Lots of people love Memorial Day weekend because of the three-day weekend and the non-stop binging on fleshy dead animals, but we love it because all the rock radio stations bust out their "Top 500 of All Time" lists. We love those lists. It's where we get to hear what the mass of radio listeners consider their favorite songs and not the lunk-headed snots at Pitchfork. Will "Stairway" still be on top? Will people finally realize just how God-awful the Eagles really are? And most importantly, how much radio do you have to listen to just so you can hear the classic rock goodness that is the Top 20 songs? This year, both Live 105 and 107.7 the Bone busted out their Top 500 lists and that made the weekend even that more exciting. It was a veritable smorgasbord of rock. It also meant we got to hear what the favorite songs of both forty-something mullet heads and the alienated youth are. It's like a parallel world thing-- one is a list of everything before 1990 and the other is a list of pretty much everything after 1990. If we had only gotten Top 500 lists from both Alice and KFOG it would have been that much better because we could have also have gotten the favorite songs of Marina Chicks and white-bred Yupsters too. But, alas. ...

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. ...

SFist goes to the Civil War Reenactment at Roaring Camp...

When we were growing up, we took rhubarb for granted. It was just part of the vegetable patch along the back fence. Our mother had two flower gardens, two vegetable gardens, a strawberry patch, a cherry tree (which never gave fruit, because we didn't have a cross-pollinating tree), asparagus mixed in with the daffodils that lined the back of the house, a raspberry bush, and grapes growing on the trellis in front of the......

SFist reviews Architecture in Helsinki at Great American Music Hall May 23, 2006...

Saturday: We're taking in the first annual San Francisco Young Playwrights Festival, which showcases the winners of this citywide high school playwriting contest at 8 p.m. on May 26 and 27, and at 2 p.m. on May 28, at Diego Rivera Theatre at City College. Get tickets here to see the literary stars of tomorrow, today! Sunday: Dude, Carnaval! With Grand Marshal Dora The Explorer!? The parade starts on 24th and Bryant at 9:30,......

The Chron's Leah Garchik gets all the good dirt -- she breaks the news in Friday's The In Crowd that Gavin Newsom has parted ways with Scientologist/actress Sofia Milos. Your gossip hounds at SFist are bereft. On the bright side, this does give us a new fantasy to contemplate -- that Gavin charters a flight down to Barbados for Memorial Day, goes all The Graduate at the Guilfency nuptials ("KimberLEEEEE! KimberLEEE!!!"), and the two of......

A very enthusiastic "HER MOTHER AND I DO!" of support to the genius tipster who passed along the Exclusive Details about the impending Kimberly Guilfoyle-Eric Villency (hereinafter, "the Guilfency") Memorial Day nuptials in Barbados, from Fashion Week Daily! Eric proposed with a 5.2 carat Asscher-cut diamond (huh huh, you said "ass"), which, for those of you in the know, is exactly the same size and shape as Kate Hudson's. Ooh, goody! The big day is......

Dum-dum-da-DUM, dum-dum-DA-dum..... -- that's right! SF's own J.Lo, Kimberly Guilfoyle avant Newsom, has announced that she's getting married in Barbados on Memorial Day, in three weeks! Who's the lucky mayor TV personality? Eric Villency, who hosts the TV show iDesign, a decorating show on the Fine Living network. Okay, Sofia Milos is kind of a C-list celebrity, but no doubt that CSI: Miami outranks cable channel 182. We've been looking around for their wedding registries......

Okay, here's the thing. Like any fine, upstanding, patriotic, healthy, normal human American, we have always been completely disgusted by the unpleasant heap that is our body. Years of cute haircuts and frantic Jazzercise have done nothing to erase the anxieties that nag us (and you, and just about everyone who has ever lived) every time we take a shower, namely that we're utterly goofy-looking. We need work. Our body's a fixer-upper. When getting......

Want to know how to get SFist's attention? Try sending us a press release that reads like this: THIS EMAIL IS FOR YOUR EYES ONLY—PLEASE EAT EMAIL AFTER READING. You've been sent this email because you are a Person of Special Interest. The Billboard Liberation Front is planning a large-scale improvement on Monday, May 30th—Memorial Day. I don't want to give away too much about the nature of improvement, but I will go as......

Obviously you're going to spend a good portion of the holiday weekend doing holiday-type activities like going to the beach, scarfing down BBQ and tipping back a few beers in the sunshine. You might even head out to the Mission to catch the Carnaval parade on Sunday. SFist highly recommends all these things. That's what Memorial Day is all about afterall. Sort of. Memorial Day is also meant to honour those service men and......

Our concert picks for the week of 5/26-6/1. Although Memorial Day should mean more than just a day off from work (if you get the day off, and, well, if you have a job), clubs do take advantage of the three day weekend by offering up an action-packed Sunday night. But of course, San Francisco offers up stellar music events all week long. You could spend tonight with the straight-from-the-bottle swillers in The Cuts at......