Here's todays sports news...

Ah, the perfect San Francisco date. Nothing says love like a sourdough bread bowl filled with New England clam chowder, a few hundred barking, stinky sea lions, and a blue square (aka registered sex offender) escorting an underage girl through the biggest tourist trap in the city. If you thought that buskers jumping out from behind garbage cans were the scariest thing about Fisherman's Wharf, now there's something else to keep you away from the......

Since our trimethyldioxypurist is on the road for Labor Day, we're stepping in on the caffeine beat to pass along some sad news: Peet's Coffee founder Alfred Peet died earlier this week (Wednesday) in Oregon. Mr. Peet, born in Holland, opened the first Peet's at Walnut and Vine in Berkeley in 1966, and watched it spread nationwide (there's Peet's in New England now?). And the rumors you've heard about the Peet's/Starbucks connections are true: the......

Few San Francisco burghs are as tucked away as Glen Park. Despite the ingenious presence of a BART station and a handful of popular restaurants (Chenery Park, Gialina, La Corneta), the neighborhood isn’t the kind of place most people randomly end up on a stroll or a ride. Unlike, for instance, Hayes Valley, or much of the Mission, you make a bit of an effort to get here. Aspiring to become a high-profile destination-neighborhood is not on Glen Park’s agenda. Its reputation as a charming, homey little district stems from narrow, hillside lanes such as Sussex St., where the mood is assuredly residential. There’s something vaguely coastal New England in the air at certain moments along this block between Castro and Diamond, and it stems from more than the street’s name. It could be called Constantinople Place and we’d still be tempted to naively pin the “Cape Cod meets San Francisco” tag on the place....

We told you, Colts vs. Bears in the Super Bowl. Man, we knew we should have gone to Vegas. Anyways, we're happy with the game, not necessarily because it'll be a good game, but because it's two of the original NFL teams with great traditions and great, traditional uniforms. How could you not love a game that harkens back to the 50's and 60's? ...

Stumbled across two bad ideas while walking through the Powell cable car area....

A few interesting tech stories have come out recently. Hey, we can't do Gavin all day. The Washington Post is reporting today that the State Department has come up with a new, super technologically advanced way of spying on Iran, mainly Googling people. Aahh...Google, is there anything you can't do? The hope, we guess, is that they'll stumble on some Iranian's nuclear scientist’s MySpace page and hope it mentions under their likes "developing nuclear bomb to fend off the Great Satan." The CIA, however, says that this is probably not a good way to look for intelligence and then fell over in laughter. There's actually a lot more to the story, mainly involving turf wars between the State Department and the CIA (again) over sharing information and the meaning of it all. ...

We've been east all week and pretty much braving the world without Internet access. All week, we've been reading the occasional newspaper and gotten the occasional glance at ESPN and have searched desperately to see if there was news, any news, about the Giants as they bravely sail the free agent seas. We didn't see anything. Instead, we saw one not-so-great free agent after another get signed by teams that were definitely not the Giants. Finally, once back in somewhat civilized climes (Philly) we checked on the latest word on the Orange & Black and saw that the Giants have been busy signing free agents-- Dave Roberts and Rich Aurilia (Richie!). Also supposedly on their way to San Francisco: Mark Loretta and right-hander David Weathers (no relation to Carl Weathers). In other words, wha? ...

The National Football League's Week Nine of the 2006 regular season is upon us here in the Bay Area, as well as the first tinge of wet weather. Curl up on the couch with a mug o' soup and a blanket: it's time for American football....

We were feeling pretty good about the state of the California housing market after reading the PDF of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's most recent report. Housing prices up 18.8% in the Pacific region! California's housing appreciation up 21.07% over the year-ago period and 4.65% over the previous financial quarter! The Oakland area ranked as number 44 out of 275 urban markets in terms of price appreciation -- East Bay represent! (Silicon Valley......

Happy Whatever-You-Want from all of us at American Football Spectacular! Let's have a look at the games on TV this wknd, shall we? San Diego Chargers at the Kansas City Chiefs, Saturday, 12/24/2005, 10:00 AM PST Wild Card playoff football is nothing compared to the atmosphere for two teams clawing for that last playoff spot at the end of the regular season. Truly, when it is said that "this is what it's all about;" then......

Okay, so Burger King has introduced this new coffee, B.K. Joe, available in regular, decaf, and (wait for it . . .) TURBO ("40 percent more caffeine!"). A lot of places hope to lure in customers with good coffee as a sweetener to buy other products. McDonald's, for instance, is doing something similar, but using New England as the test market, so we can't really check that out yet (using fair trade, organic coffee and hyping the quality, not the power; seems like a better idea to us). Specialty's, though, is now carrying Intelligentsia coffee, a pretty well-known brand out of Chicago that's apparently well liked amongst coffee snobs. We, in fact, were excited to hear this; Specialty's old coffee . . . well, let's just say your Trmiethyldioxypurist's cheapness is well known, yet he couldn't stomach Specialty's 50-cent-if-you-bring-your-own-cup deal back when he used to work near the Montgomery Station location. ...

Hey, everyone loves a good tool (unless you're from New England, in which case no one loves tools), and if you want to be a blogger, one of the best tools is Movable Type. Folks build blogs with it, folks use it as a simple content management system -- heck, folks even use it as a software design platform. Well, Movable Type is four years old now, and at version 3.2 is looking better......

http://images2.nfl.com/u/ap/photos/MAME116090823_lower.jpg"> It was time. Your Oakland Raiders meant to contend with the two-time defending NFL Champion New England Patriots in the marquee 2005 NFL Kickoff game. No, let us begin again, the Raiders did not go Eastward just to contend. There was talk within the Nation of cold revenge, of making a statement, of something that had occurred here just a few seasons past that can not be spoken about directly. Fresh arrows there......

We'd like to take a moment to remind you that tomorrow will be officially one month since the Tsunami disaster. Friend of SFist HiMY SYeD is asking that folks drop by the site and light a 'virtual candle' for the victims. This is pretty neat -- just click on the picture of the sculpture at Yerba Buena Gardens, and you can leave a candle and a note expressing your thoughts and feelings. For every......

Jackson is out this week, face-down on the floor somewhere after drinking too much egg nog. The final football weekend of 2004 pretty much ended just like every other football weekend in 2004 for the Raiders & Niners- with losses. The fun started this Saturday as the Silver & Black played what we were told was a fun-filled and exciting game against one of the Raiders’ long-time rivals- the Kansas City Chiefs. And when......