College students, when will you ever learn? Never--never!-- try to to do the right thing by organizing a worker's union at your job. This is the quickest way to get wrongfully terminated. Case in point: Mountain View-based Uloop.com, a start-up online company that bills itself as "a marketplace for college students" (see also: Craigslist), fired two of their Cal Poly student workers allegedly for trying to unionize the company. Oops. According to Indybay: After......

The Arcade Fire came through Mountain View's Shoreline Amphitheatre last Friday. We have the pictures to prove this. A suddenly-rather-popular independent rock band, it's surprising that this little-group-that-could is suddenly playing arena-size venues. And what does The Arcade Fire sound like? Figure that the group's music is like some sort of 10-person raucously ad-hoc mix-up of Neutral Milk Hotel, Slipknot, Springsteen's E Street Band, and The Coen Bros' Hudsucker Proxy shrieking songs of broken/renewed faith......

You know we usually try to hoard up all the crime-type news for the Tuesday and Friday blotters, but there was enough vaguely unsettling news this weekend to warrant a post a little early, we thought. To wit: --Fernando Gonzalez, an 18-year-old Redwood City man, died after he fell into a vat of sulfuric acid. Gonzalez was working the early-morning shift at Coastal Circuits Factory this weekend, without a protective face mask, when he appeared......

-- The Arcade Fire: LCD Soundsystem and Wild Light open for this white-hot -- that's right, white-hot, or so we hear -- Canadian indie-rock band. Music starts tonight at 7 p.m. at Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View; $19-40. -- High School Musical: You know what? We watched this on Disney and it sucked us in. Sad, yes. Absorbing, for sure. Ray of Light Theatre and School of the Arts (SOTA) put on......

Last week's winner, the San Jose Metro: Google Earth gets sound. Free spay/neuter for pit bulls in the South Bay (females over 6 months pay a little extra.). Cover article: Profile of an improv cartoonist. Crosswording favorite Etta James in performance. The Three Sisters in Mountain View. Russian food and deli in Campbell. And a vegan wedding! And next up, the Bay Guardian: Tim Redmond and the Guardian editorial board go in with both fists......

...And that's not even the curviest part! A car chase that started in Marin County around 3:00 a.m. Monday morning ended abruptly when the driver, speeding at around 75 mph over the Golden Gate Bridge, overshot the turn from Doyle Drive onto Lombard Street and flipped over. A open fifth of Hennessey was found in the car, and the passengers are in SF General with non-fatal injuries. Your SF Labor Day weekend homicide count: 3.......

Andrew Frame was recently named by BusinessWeek as a "top entrepreneur under the age of 30". He's aiming to fulfill that promise with ooma, a company he founded in 2005 that has a whole new take on telephony. It enables unlimited U.S. domestic calls to any wireless or landline phone number . ooma's gotten media play for a couple reasons -- for one thing, much has been made in the press and on the podwaves about the involvement of Ashton Kutcher in the company. ...

-- All About Eve: Brutal, drunk, rapid-fire dialogue; famous lines ("Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night," etc.); and a backstage story told so, so, so well make this '50s film more than just a camp classic. Starring Bette Davis. Screens tonight at 7 p.m. at the Castro Theatre, Castro & Market Streets; $9.50. -- Rush: Canadian rock flows freely at 7:30 p.m., Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy, (Mountain View); $29.50-$79.50.......

--Turns out rescuers totally missed the car of the missing Alameda County woman and her priest friend, even though they got exact directions from 911. [Chron.] --An Oakland Tribune sports columnist apologizes for calling the A's racist. [92510; read the original column cached on Google here.] --Come to California, Barack Obama! [Calitics.] --A pedestrian was hit by an SUV at Folsom and Main. [A reader, who requested that we give you the link to WalkSF,......

Kwik-E-Mart, a store normally confined to your television set, is invading 7-Eleven stores across the country; locally, there's one in Mountain View. ...

So Newsweek's come out with its rankings of "the top public high schools in the country," and the Bay Area has 9 10 schools in the top 300: Magnet school Lowell High in SF topped the list at 57, and Monta Vista in Cupertino came in second (85). The rest of your schools: Mission San Jose in Fremont (140), Burlingame High School (196), Mountain View High School (213), Andrew P. Hill in San Jose......

Bay Area pianist Jon Nakamatsu was the last American to win the Van Cliburn prize, the Nobel prize for classical concert pianists. We would have said the Presidential Medal of Freedom for pianists, but Van Cliburn himself actually received that award in 2003 from fellow Texan George W. Bush, even though, unlike other Bush nominees, Van Cliburn did deserve it. Jon won the Van Cliburn gold medal in 1997 and that was the kick-off of......

We haven't done one of these columns in awhile! --Killer squirrels on the attack! A menacing critter stomped into an open classroom in a South San Jose school and bit a first-grader on the finger and two adults in the classroom. They called 911, but when animal control arrived, the squirrel had fled -- or in their words, "He high-tailed it outta there." Har! The school took pains to say that they don't usually have......

From the Daily Show to the Googleplex -- Republican presidential hopeful Walnuts John McCain, struggling in the polls and in fundraising, gamely stopped by Mountain View yesterday afternoon for an hourlong forum with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google employees. The questions were respectful but tough from the fairly-liberal crowd, touching on McCain's flip-flopping reembrace of religious fundamentalists after calling them "agents of intolerance" in 2000, his support of the Iraq war, the firing......

Can you help identify the man in a coma at SF General? The man, who appears to be in his 20s, was dropped off about a week ago, by someone who said he was a pastor or minister but who left the hospital before they could get any more information. 5'10, 190 pounds, short brown hair and brown eyes, and he has several tattoos (one of which pictured at left, because we couldn't bear to......

When we go on vacation, we always worry somewhat paranoiacally that our house has burned down, or that the ants have taken over, or that we left all the major appliances running and the iron and the dishwasher are plotting their coup -- but coming home from a two-week vacation and finding a dead body is not a scenario that had occurred to us! The vacationer mentioned that he did have a catsitter coming in......

-Man hit and killed at the Mountain View Caltrain station, delaying the trains for 45 minutes....

>-Steve Jobs might still be in a little bit of trouble. -It may not be as cold as a witch's tit, but it's still pretty damn cold. ...

It's the annual Best Of post, the one post in the year where I get to use the first person singular! Hooray! From the Starbucks (not really a) bomber in January to the opening of the Daiso in December, it was certainly one heck of a year, wasn't it? There was BUSH TER DOWN; the Chron's series about police brutality getting upstaged by their misidentification of the cop in question; Kimberly Guilfoyle's new boyfriend,......

Expect a snarled commute today: three cars and two trucks mixed it up on southbound 101 near 22nd Street at 2:19 p.m.. Only minor injuries, but Officer Cakebread of the CHP (awesome name) says there's no ETA on how long it'll take to clear the highway. That means more time with you and the light hits on KOIT. Officer Cakebread is all over the news today -- earlier, he came to our attention when he......

Last week's winner, the SF Weekly. Josh Wolf's mom writes a letter, as does transgender activist Chris Daley and an angry rebutter to Hiya Swanhuyser 's article about a rural rock documentary. The Bouncer's article about Huey Lewis and the mentally disabled won an award and is included in the Best Music Writing of 2006 anthology. Congrats, Bouncer! Are you an Apologist for the Blue Angels? If you're SFist Jon, the answer is yes. Skater......

We're heading down to the Make Out Room (3225 22nd St. b/w Mission and Valencia) tonight for LitPAC and LitQuake's Progressive Reading Series featuring Dave Eggers, Keith Knight, Mary Roach (author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers), and more, hosted by Stephen Elliott author of Looking Forward To It: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process. This is the last of this year's series of monthly......

This morning around 6:45, a pedestrian was killed by a northbound Caltrain near the Mountain View train station. Train service was help up for about an hour afterwards and started up again around 8 and there were 20-30 minute delays afterwards. It's the twelfth death this year involving the trains. There were ten last year and according to the police, about 80% of them were suicides. ...

--D6 candidate Matt Drake says Chris Daly's never talked about tidal power before because Daly doesn't want to work with Newsom. We thought tidal power was a Matt Gonzalez idea. Besides, District 6 doesn't border the ocean. --Greg Dewar finds the MUNI Goofus and Gallant. --Arts education is coming back to SF. --The head of the housing authority still dreams of being a stand-up comic. --Mountain View is going to start trapping and killing the......

We knew we should have saved the dead llama story for just one more day -- it's time for another Animal Roundup! Kids and parents are freaking out in Mountain View, as the squirrels in Cuesta Park go on the attack! Over the last three months, three people have been bitten by the aggressive rodents, which are becoming desperate for food after the installation of anti-squirrel trash cans in the park. Check out this paragraph......

This week's offerings represent the Bay Area's diversity. If that's too PC for you, go for the ones with a touch of taboo....

We were busy geeking out in the Sierra this weekend. Luckily, you won't find yourself covered with hundreds of tiny leeches after diving into any of these events. Tuesday and Wednesday: Flock, "The web browser for you and your friends," is hosting meetups in San Francisco (Tuesday) and Mountain View (Wednesday). Pass along your feature requests, we hear they're gearing up for a new version. Thursday: Adobe is hosting a free event, "InDesign Inside Out,"......

We've held out this long, and we're only gonna make this jokes once, but this summer, watch out for... Drinks on a plane! (We'll now run across the street and demand of the priest an appropriately harsh prescription for penance.) But don't worry, technology and, to a lesser extent, the Bush and Blair administrations, are here to protect you. With biometric terrorist detectors, other tech that's been around for generations, and the latest in arbitrary......

A guy named Penisimani Schneider was arrested in Mountain View for assaulting his wife and trying to slash her with a knife, with five of his children present in the house. Yes, it's terrible, but we've gotta ask -- what kind of name is Penisimani? Is this like Mike Litoris? New contributor SFist Sarah L passed along the following East Bay tidbit: an Emeryville man was arrested after attacking his girlfriend with her own shoe.......

Yes, yes, we usually start with last week's winner, but we're so excited about getting voted best local blog by the Guardian that we're dispensing with convention and starting off with them. Boo yah! Wanna know the best thing about being best local blog? Our listing is on the same page as Gavin Newsom's, for "best local politician," and the rabidly non-Newsom SFBG does such a tooth-grindingly good job making lemonade out of lemons for......