The Palme d'Or-robbed gem The Silent Scream landed a confused and sick Milpitas' Russell Middle School teacher in the fiery hot waters of bureaucratic hell after he recently screened this anti-abortion film in his chemistry class. According to CBS 5: The film was shown on January 23, after students in all five of Randy Yang's chemistry classes finished taking a test. The first year teacher reportedly asked his students if they wanted to watch......

Oh, those crazy hot-tubbing, wife-swapping, Al Qaeda-loving Marin County folk. It seems that now they're scalping their own children in an effort to tidy up the remaining Cosco Busan oil spill disaster. Students from Larkspur's Marin Primary and Middle School have willing lopped off locks of hair from their nubile heads, then donating said hair to Eco-Cuts, "a program designed by Marin Primary to help in the cleanup effort triggered by the Nov. 7......

Here's todays sports news...

According to CBS 5 (interrupting us right in the middle of The People's Court, no less!) "East Contra Costa County residents are being evacuated from an area near the unincorporated town of Knightsen because of a possible explosive device found inside of a residential motor home." Motor homes and explosive devices? Who could've imagined!? Anyway, that's all the info posted so far. We'll update as soon as more info becomes available. Update: Taken (again!)......

-- March, rally, die. [Bluoz, SFGate] -- Zombie, thrill(er), dance. [SFWeekly] -- Mac OS X Leopard...on your PC! [Laughing Squid] -- San Francisco's Visitacion Valley Middle School's principal to receive highest honor available for principals. Okay then. [CBS5] -- Half Moon Bay gang rape sentencing delayed. (Karma's a bitch, boys. Well, for you all it sure will be.) [Examiner] -- 32 Heron Street. Mmm, bricky SOMA goodness. [Curbed SF] -- Plane high dives into the......

Try drowning Dave Eggers, Michelle Tea, Stephen Elliott, Beth Lisick, Barb Bersche, Eileen Hassi, or 826 Program Director Erin Neeley, via a dunking booth, this Sunday afternoon at the first 8/26 Day Festival. The literary bash will feature live performances, cartooning, Everett Middle School's dance troupe, readings, local writers (pardon me, novelists), paper flower making, haiku writing, bon mots flying to and fro, and much, much, much more. The festivities go from 1 p.m.......

Here's todays news...

As a bunch of school kids waited at the curb for the school bus to take them home, an SUV jumped the corner of where they were standing and struck several of the kids down. At least thirteen people, including the driver, were injured and several of them have been hospitalized. This all happened in front of Ralston Middle School in Belmont around 12:30 today. ...

In a horrific incident, an 3-year-old bouncing on a set of mattresses eight stories up fell to her death through a screen shielding an open window in the room. The 20-year-old babysitter, who was in charge of watching six or seven kids (including two of her own), had fallen asleep in another room. The babysitter was attacked by angry bystanders, and had to be rescued by authorities. The authorities have ruled the incident an accident,......

You've gotta admire SFCityscape's Steve Boland for putting his money where his Muni-griping mouth is. While lesser sites (like SFist, we freely admit) are content just to bitch and moan about Muni, SF Cityscape wants to buy you a drink at Trad'r Sam. First, come out for the Richmond Town Hall Meeting with Mayor Newsom and Supervisor McGoldrick, this Saturday, July 29 from noon to 2 at Presidio Middle School (450 30th Ave between Geary......

You know, some days you log onto SFGate.com and you think, wow, there's a lot of weird local news today. *A man carjacked, kidnapped, and raped a nun in the Mission, and then went to the cops, saying he wanted to return the car. He says he just "borrowed" the car and he didn't know the woman was a nun. That's not a very good defense, sir. *A mylar balloon shorted out some power lines......

Wednesday has 100 gmail invitations left! Tonight: Former SF firefighter Caroline Paul reads from her first novel, East Wind, Rain (about 1940s Hawaii), at Clean Well-Lighted. Paul wrote an acclaimed memoir of her time in the SFFD, called Fighting Fire, but what's also notable is that her identical twin sister is the actress Alexandra Paul from Baywatch. (Caroline is the Gay Twin in the picture to your right.) Thursday: We're never going to be done celebrating the 1906 quake! The Exploratorium and the SF Arts Commission are presenting a spoken word event with WritersCorp youth poets from Everett Middle School, who will read from their new collection Solid Ground, and create interactive poetry with the audience. 6-8 p.m., $13 adults, $10 students, $8 kids from 4-12. and Friday: It's not just Lotta's Fountain's centennial -- it's Samuel Beckett's too! Celebrate a century of cheerful Irish nihilism with the ACT and the Commonwealth Club as scholars discuss his work and then actors read some of Beckett's greatest hits. (Will Godot ever show up?) The big one-oh-oh kicks off at 5:30 at 415 Geary Street, and admission is free. ...

Check out Barbary Coast this Sunday and Monday at the Balboa's Reel SF film festival! Don't you think you'd want more protective clothing and not less when you're working in carpentry? Montclair residents called the cops on a guy buck-nekkid in his backyard, sawing wood (ha!). When a neighbor came by to complain, the woodworker seemed "unconcerned" and said he was running behind (ha!). When the cops arrived, the handyman said he was going to do some work underneath his house and didn't want to get his clothes dirty. Turns out the guy's been cited three times before in Berkeley for naked home repair. Five 8th graders at Stanford Middle School have been suspended after the school determined they were responsible for spray-painting graffiti on the school. The graffiti included anarchy signs, smiley faces, swastikas, references to Columbine, dirty pictures, and mean things about teachers. Quite a mix there. Authorities also report that at least one of the students suspended was a girl. ...and in this week's Susan Polk drama, oldest son Adam called his mother "bonkers" and "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" as she continued a third day of rambling questioning about whether he had been satanically abused and whether he had threatened to kill her in the past. Jurors were seen trying to conceal smiles and giggles through the testimony....

At this rate, we're totally going to beat the Soviets to the moon! The Randall Museum is sponsoring the 24th Annual San Francisco Middle School Science Fair (scroll down), where middle schoolers in public and private schools will be putting their plywood tryptich hinged displays together, and carefully gluing on sheets of notebook paper that have the words "HYPOTHESIS," "EXPERIMENT" and "CONCLUSION" ornately lettered at the top. Fun! Though -- man, if you didn't believe science had advanced since those halcyon/horrifying days of fetal pig dissection, or if you thought that SF was no place to send a child to school, you gotta check out some of these projects -- the optimum angle for solar panels and viscosity of liquids at different temperatures -- but the one we're the most excited for is the project about why you can't use pineapple in jello molds. We're dying to know! Projects are being set up all week (.pdf), the awards ceremony is on Friday, and the fair opens to the public for one week, starting this Saturday. We are desperate to know why pineapples make jello fall apart (don't spoil it for us, anyone!). ...

Ready, aim.... and look out for firebugs this Saturday at the Noe Valley Farmers Market, as the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) and the SF Fire Department highlight this month's safety theme, "Light My Fire And Put It Out Safely Month." (that's an awesome theme.) So along with your organic oranges and leafy greens, reps from the fire department will be setting fires in the parking lot and inviting local residents to put them out. You're encouraged to bring your home fire extinguisher so you can practice using it too. We're so intrigued by this combination of "what a great idea!" and "what a terrible idea!" that this represents that we've gotta check this out. NERT runs free disaster-prep training classes throughout the city and works with neighborhood groups to coordinate emergency plans. For instance, NERT, working with the Noe Valley groups, learned that their plans to use the James Lick Middle School parking lot as their post-disaster staging area was in conflict with the school's plans to use that same parking lot to gather students. It may not matter, though, because both NERT and the school then subsequently learned that city experts are saying that the parking lot's retaining wall may collapse in an earthquake anyways. Note to self: don't go into the James Lick parking lot after an earthquake. ...

Oh, the farmer and the merchant should be friends, the farmer and the merchant should be friends -- one man likes to push a plow the other one likes to shop -- and how! but that's no reason why they can't be friends. You'll have to go that much longer without accessible fresh fruits and vegetables in the Marina, now that the merchants of Scott Street have successfully blocked a Tuesdays' farmers market from setting up stands on their street. (There's a longer article about this in today's Examiner, but it's not online yet for some reason). All but four business and three tenants on Scott Street signed a petition against reopening the Marina Farmers' Market, claiming that all those bright, fresh-tasting leafy greens and tart apples interfered with parking and cut into their Tuesday profits. McGoldrick and Ma killed the request at the City Ops and Neighborhood Services meeting yesterday, and proposed to move the market to the Marina Middle School on Saturdays instead, to which (other) merchants complained that the same tomatoes and sugar snap peas would drive traffic away from Chestnut and onto Fillmore instead. The request is up for a full vote at today's Board of Supes meeting. Marina-ite folks should stick together -- Scott Street vendors should all be pals! Pluto's should dance with the farmers' daughters, farmers dance with the trendy bath products vendors' gals! Picture from the SF Center for Urban Education for Sustainable Agriculture...

The city of Fremont has decided that to save money, police will no longer respond to burglar alarms unless there's some sort of evidence that a crime is underway. On the one hand, only about 1% of all burglar alarms are for legitimate crime, Fremont's spending almost $700,000 a year responding to them, they've already cut all other police expenses, and only 20% of the city even has alarms. On the other, you imagine a number of people wearing black catsuits and black knitted caps tiptoeing around Fremont with bulky packages under their arms and violin strings plucking in the background. (We know it makes sense to cut the alarm budget, but we can't help it, that's what we think of!) And finally, the cops caught the guy who held up two teachers at Visitacion Middle School in the city at gunpoint while wearing a rainbow clown wig and an orange safety patrol vest. (That is so insult to injury.) The gunman was already in custody in San Mateo County on unrelated charges. Update: Newly-breaking crime news so entertaining that we bumped the original first entry off the top (a brothel in Concord) to make room. San Francisco firefighters rushing to a small garage fire on 20th Avenue between Taraval and Santiago last night found 2000 pot plants in the otherwise-abandoned apartment. The heat lamps for the plants caused the fire, and it took the police two and a half hours to take all the cheeba out. Investigation's ongoing. ...

Ahh, career day. There's nothing quite as inspirational as inspirational speakers coming into school to tell you how if you work hard, you too could become a lawyer or a doctor or a successful businessman. Not to mention a stripper. Today, parents of Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School are agog and aghast when popular career day speaker William Fried told eighth-graders that being a stripper or an exotic dancer could be a lucrative job (not......

Bay area crime roundup...

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)....