(By Eyleen Tavy) Following a link on the always-excellent Eater SF's Board Wrap (they lurk so we don't have to), we came across this sterling remark: "A friend of mine who lives in the Financial District asked me not to call it FiDi." What? We didn't know this was bad. We feel like the well-meaning folks who try to engage us when we go back home to Delaware, all "So how's it in San......

We came back from taking down the recycling yesterday evening to find we had locked ourselves out of our apartment. "Noooo!!" [Insert Emo Darth Vader ballad here. Warning -- audio.] We dialed the apartment manager on the call-box but got his voice mail. Lucky for us, the manager, who wouldn't be back until 10:00, called our s.o., who wouldn't be back until 8:00, and our s.o. called our friend who lives a few blocks away.......

My Morning Jacket's newest live recording entitled The 2006-2007 New Year’s Eve Skit Picture Disc Skit (Could they pick a longer title?) is available now through the band's website. The recording is from their New Year's Eve performance at the Fillmore last year. If you were there, you would know that it was a "Oregon Trail"-themed performance. (OMG, how cool is that!) But we're curious, how do you pull off an "Oregon Trail"-themed party?......

SFist interviews the Reverend Billy of "what would jesus buy?"...

Phillyist prepared to party by doing the hustle, lighting the lights, shopping up a storm, and... visiting Khrushchev? LAist continues to cover the Hollywood Writers Strike with visiting guest "strikers" such as KT Tunstall and Presidential candidate John Edwards. To celebrate Veteran's Day, they visited a Civil War reenactment and to celebrate Geography Week, they asked all the Los Angeles City Councilmembers about the districts they represent finding that LA's 180+ official neighborhoods are......

We just received word that for the past two or three days (!?), 17th Street has been without power from at least Valencia up to Dolores. Anyone else have any word of this supposed outage? Seeing as how this is one attractive and expensive strip of real estate, right at the nexus of two neighborhoods, this is of the utmost importance. An SFister writes to us from the dark, telling us that 17th Street......

Among San Francisco’s myriad neighborhoods, few are as widely misunderstood as the Outer Sunset. Location certainly plays a role. To your average Upper Haight resident – to say nothing of your average South of Market or North Beach resident – this beach-adjacent community may seem as distant as Honolulu, with an N-Judah trip that may rival a flight to Oahu in terms of travel time. But it’s sometimes easy to forget that San Francisco is a mere seven miles wide, and that the folks out west do have phone numbers that begin with 415, rather than 808....

Members of the exclusive Norteño gang in the Mission District got capped with a civil injunction today, barring them from hanging out each other in a 60-square-block area and from loitering after 10 p.m., according to a report in the Chronicle. Those who are subject to the preliminary injunction...can be arrested in the 60-square-block zone -- and face up to six months in jail -- if they engage in one of a number of......

It really is all about the other side of Market Street now. Along with neighborhoods that we've heard of before like Pike Place in Seattle; Hillcrest in San Diego; and Park Slope in Brooklyn, N.Y. -- our xenophobia runs deep, folks -- as well as hoods that we've never heard of such as Chatham Village, Pittsburgh; Eastern Market neighborhood of Washington, D.C.; Elmwood Village in Buffalo, N.Y.; and Old West Austin in Austin, our......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

Awesome last name recipient and New York Times contributor Nicole Spiridakis covered NOPA (AKA, "North of the Panhandle" -- of course) in this past weekend's travel section of the NYT, "Colonizing an Urban Frontier". Spiridakis tells us that "an influx of attention-getting restaurants and boutiques in the last decade has made it one of the city's cooler destinations, even as it struggles to maintain its gritty individuality." Though we must disagree with the claim......

Hey how was your weekend? You didn't have to work, did you? Muni certainly didn't: on Saturday, NextMuni showed only one bus running the entire 33 route all by itself. Expected wait time: ranging from an hour to an hour and a half. We were hoping to swing by Cliff's in the Castro (they've got these awesome elephant-shaped teapots), but obviously you can't go shopping in neighborhoods you can't get to. Sorry, MUMC! So,......

Last week's winner, the SF Weekly! Letters from people who say they are not in a cult. An article about former SFist editor Eve Batey's promotion at the Chron! Go Eve! Also, they called us a "sassy" local blog. We loved Sassy! Cover article: A guy who makes money suing small businesses under the ADA. A review of the Kiki & Herb show. The Simpsons movie is okay. Meredith didn't much like her North Beach......

Street fashion sites like The Sartorialist -- whose frightening clarity made us weep after saying that the "idea of dark pattern mixing for summer at Prada was one of the best looks of the season,” because now dark prints are all that we can think about. Really, it consumes us -- are so popular, it only makes sense that San Francisco would soon have one of its own. And it does: SF Street Fashion. It......

Banner week for SFist as the site's new editor introduced himself -- hooray for Brock! While the NY Times weighed in on SF's mayoral race, only SFist had the (insert tongue firmly into cheek) hard-hitting latest on candidate/activist Josh Wolf. Coverage of a protest vs. gentrification spawned a fantastic debate amongst SFist's readers. Finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous: video of a man that confused a Board of Supes meeting with "open mic......

Say hello to your new next door neighbor: a parking garage. Petitioners are currently collecting signatures for a "build more parking" petition, but the terms are insane: it wouldn't just allow developers to install big garages, it would require that all new homes build on extra parking, at the expense of living space. Require! As in, the government says that you don't have a choice! More room for cars means less room to house......

Here where the Mission melts into the Castro to the west, and Noe Valley to the southwest, it’s a bit unclear which neighborhood we’re wandering around. If the shiny new brown sign at the foot of the hilly 000 block of Fair Oaks St. is to be taken seriously - and frankly, it’s not - then we’ve landed in the Liberty Hill Historic District. Crafty, real crafty. San Francisco needs more fictional “sub-neighborhoods” whose names reek of realtor-sponsored specificity, with the express intention of spiking property values, like it needs another earthquake. But since we’re still east of Dolores, let’s just go with the safe bet: this is the western edge of the Mission. Too general? Can we keep a straight face by upgrading this leg of Fair Oaks to tony-sounding Dolores Heights? What’s next? Pinning the “Amoeba Gulch” tag on the westernmost block of Haight?...

We found it pretty interesting that the L.A. Times saw fit to publish a feature story examining teh Haight, complete with quotes from actor Peter Coyote, a Marin Resident. (Leave it to the LaLa Times to turn to an actor for quotes . . . ). ...

According to an article on PC World, Yahoo's mapping product is undergoing some improvements. The company is switching from a third-party data provider to an in-house platform that it hopes will prove more accurate, scalable, and user friendly--including better print-outs. Of note to us, visitors to Yahoo Maps, supposedly starting today, will have access to more detailed renditions of neighborhoods and buildings in New York City and San Francisco. ...

Gavin's not the only one looking to clean the streets this year, but the Board of Supervisors do to. Or more like Aaron Peskin who proposed using part of the budget surplus to pay for twenty new city employees to help clean everything up. The money will only be for the rest of the year but will continue onwards and upwards if there's money for it. ...

How's your water pressure right now? Reports are coming in from around the city that sinks and lavatories are running dry. One source tells us that the city water department was doing some seismic upgrades and accidentally wound up turning off water for a bunch of neighborhoods. It'll be back on in about an hour, we're told. Were you impacted? We'd like to hear from you about how widespread this problem is.......

Not content to spooge up the atmosphere and mutilate pedestrians, Toyota's claimed your neighborhood fixtures as their own advertising space. It's bad enough that they've got their larger posters pasted on the abandoned construction site at 18th and Mission, but we spotted this small locker-sized contribution stuck to a nearby utility pole. (To avoid giving them free advertising, we've replaced their URL with that of a comparable organization.) The image on the poster is......

Okay, this has been killing us all afternoon. So we were checking out the pictures from Gavin Newsom's reelection campaign kickoff rally from Sunday on his campaign website's "Brian Blogs," and it looks like they decorated the office with lots and lots of signs featuring the names of different SF neighborhoods. Sure, cool, no prob. But.... what's the neighborhood in the sign at the very right of that picture? The Om---? What SF neighborhood......

Yesterday, at the intersection of Leavenworth and O'Farrell a red Toyota ran a red light and slammed into a cab. The cab then ricocheted into the side of a building. Both drivers suffered injuries, none serious. ...

You feel important standing there, in the cold of the Tenderloin night, hitting the buzzer next to the intimidating big brown door, a group of friends behind you, all just like you—a little nervous and curious as to what will be behind that door, or if you will even be let in. When the door does crack open there’s a pretty hostess on the other side, looking the crowd of you over suspiciously, as if she were your paranoid aunt in Indiana, unsure of even answering the door so late at night. Except your not in Indiana, your smack in the middle of one of San Francisco’s ugliest neighborhoods, eagerly waiting to be given entry into the much talked about Bourbon & Branch. You’re let in only after you give the pretty gatekeeper the password, which none of you want to mutter, mostly because you feel like an asshole not being let into a bar before saying a password. To be clear, you can’t say, “Roger, party of six”, you have to say “Boogie Boogie”, or some equally ridiculous word or phrase given to you after you made your reservations at the exclusive Bourbon and Branch....

Quick -- which one of those pictures above is of Valencia Street in SF and which is of Williamsburg in Brooklyn? Bay Area blogger Overstated has put together his list of what New York neighborhoods correspond to which San Francisco ones. Check out his list, and let the great debates begin! Here's some calls we agree with: --Totally Williamsburg is the Mission. Last time we were on Bedford Avenue, honest to God we thought......

We've gotten several e-mails about a shooting in Lower Haight, around 9:30 or so this morning on Webster Street between Page and Haight. We don't know much of the details but we do know there was a lot of police in the area and a bus was pulled over, probably to see if there were any eyewitnesses. ...

Last Friday, the Examiner got their hands on a bunch of statistics and a calculator and crunched a whole bunch of numbers about crime in the city. Their verdict is that curiously, the number of homicides has gone up but the number of people arrested for said homicides has gone down. It doesn't take a math major to realize that's not very good. ...

Sunday. Usually, a quiet, contemplative day in the Blogosphere. But not here in the Ist-a-Verse. Nonono! Just look below and see all of the wild and crazy stuff our staffs are up to....

-There were 85 homicides in San Francisco in 2006 which, believe it or not, is an 11% drop from last year. It's also against the trend elsewhere. -Three people were killed in a shooting in the Bayview district Friday night. A fourth is still in critical condition ...