Last week's winner, the East Bay Express. Dream cartoonist: Fascist zombies versus Marxist ones. So hard to tell the difference sometimes! The situation with the Oakland Trib union. Internal disputes at an East Bay lesbian bar. Cover article: should you store your baby's umbilical cord blood or donate it? Hand-churned ice cream in Fruitvale. Hey, we didn't know I Like Eating is a teacher! We would totally be in I Like Eating's homeroom class! Yoshi's......

--Gavin Newsom angrily denies Chris Daly's cocaine allegations, calls them "sleazy," and calls for everyone in the Board of Supes to condemn them. Tom Ammiano says he thought it was one of Daly's better speeches. [The Chron (and audio clip), CBS 5 (with video of Daly at the meeting and Newsom's denial), ABC 7 (also with video), Fog City, Beyond Chron, Examiner, SF Sentinel. Watch the video from SFGov here, around item 36.] --Your Two......

--Dog culture in San Francisco. [The Chron.] --Naked protestors embracing trees in Oakland. [KGO 7; more pictures at the Chron] --Teen shot in the Mission Saturday night. [the SFist tips line -- other links here.] --There's lots of accidents on the 80/880 interchange. [Oakland Trib.] --What happened to that con artist who pretended to be a track star at Palo Alto High and then at Princeton? [SJ Merc News.] --Trial starts tomorrow for the......

Duck meatballs from the Oakland Tribune. We gobble the various food sections up each Wednesday. Here are our favorite nibbles from today's offerings. It's short but suh-weet. SF Chronicle: Breaking bread with neighbors and "new friends"/potential love mates continues to catch on at community tables. An explanation from restaurant guru Clark Wolf perhaps explains why the post 9/11 trend has taken awhile to grow: "...Americans don't share space well. So it took a little......

The Oakland Trib has an extremely depressing story about a pediatric AIDS study that's had its funding cut. The Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trial Group, a combined effort of UCSF and the Children's Hospital and Research Center Oakland, had been getting $750,000 a year from the National Institutes of Health to study mother-to-child transmission of the virus and the effectiveness of drugs in pediatric care. No longer. The problem? They've done it too well. ...

Know why all of a sudden Matier and Ross are interested in auto theft all of a sudden? Because someone broke into Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi's car, that's why! Ross wandered out in his beloved District 5 to find that someone had made off with the steering column of his 1970 VW. Of course Mirkadreamy drives a 1970 VW. Ross called the cops, who seemed kind of indifferent about it, and now the Conquistador's upset. You......

Aw, you guys! Have we told you lately how much we love you? We sent out a plea for pictures from yesterday's Barack Obama rally in Oakland and all you awesome readers who went sent along some amazing pictures. Take that, Chronicle news photogs! (though this aerial picture they have is also really cool.) Obama threw out some fightin'-mad blue-state rhetoric ("I am proud to have opposed the war," and "Don't stand next to......

A devoted VW van owner and dedicated "VW Heads" managed to find the owner's prized avocado-green 1971 bus (valued between $16,000 and $20,000) after it was stolen from the Ashby BART station last Friday. The owner had passed out flyers all over Oakland and Berkeley asking for information, and other VW devotees got in touch with him to let him know they'd seen the van in the area. After some sleuthing all day Wednesday, they......

Two guys were arrested in Oakland over the weekend for firing paintballs at eight random passersby and one dog. A cop said, "I know a lot of people use it more like a toy, but without the proper gear or equipment it can actually cause injury or death." There's a very detailed shot-by-shot account of the incident in the Oakland Trib -- this would be even better if it were illustrated with a Family Circus Jeffy-walks-around-the-neighborhood dotted-line style picture. Authorities think a body that they found in the bay in Oakland is a man who jumped into the water with a knife and repeatedly refused assistance from the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard says they tossed him a life ring numerous times but he swam away from it each time. This reminds us of that homily about the man who's sitting on a roof of a flooding house and refuses to get on two rescue boats and a helicopter, saying God will provide. There's been a fourth armed robbery in Palo Alto, this time of a Stanford grad student walking to his on-campus housing. The police department has provided a sketch of the suspects and suggests walking in groups at night. ...

A 78-year-old South Berkeley woman is being held on charges that she shot a 36-year-old in the stomach. The victim wasn't sure why she'd been targeted, but said the two of them might have been having some man problems. The injury isn't life-threatening. ....and the Oakland Trib moves into some blotter territory of its own, as it lists the hilariousest crime items for this holiday season: the police officer attacked by a pack of chihuahuas (ankle injury reported) and the woman who found a stranger at her home computer, changing her screensaver to "erotic Indian art." A million stories in the naked city, friends. And a music student in San Francisco is freaking out after someone stole a $175,000 violin from the locked trunk of her car. The student parked her car at that Safeway on Webster by Japantown without actually going into the store, and the car was towed. When she got to Golden Gate Tow, even though the car had been locked, her iPod and wallet were missing -- as was the violin, which a dealer had lent her to try out. Fingers are pointing all around -- but we're like, who knew they actually went and towed illegally-parked cars at Safeway? Unnerving! ...

Aw, SFist Eve -- look at the little bunny rabbit! The Oakland Animal Shelter is looking for people to help foster the 30 baby bunnies they found being illegally sold at an East Bay flea market, where they found 6-8 bunnies all crammed into a tiny box. The bunnies are too young to be spayed/neutered or to be adopted, but the shelter is running out of space for 'em. No, you may not pick one up to give as a holiday present either; the shelter won't allow it. From the small to the large -- divers raced out to free a humpback whale that had gotten entangled in crab pot lines near the Farallones Islands, just off the San Francisco coast. The whale had somehow managed to get wrapped around four times in lines weighing about 90 pounds total, which were cutting into its blubber and dragging its blowhole under water. When they freed the whale, it reportedly gave them all a quick nuzzle before swimming away (presumably as fast as possible). And starting today, the Peninsula Humane Society will begin adopting out the animals rescued from the Gulf Coast. The national Humane Society asked local shelters to wait until Dec. 15 to allow hurricane victims as long as possible to reunite with their pets. Before adopting, do note -- you may be asked to surrender it if its original owner shows up. ...

Har! Remember Maria Alquilar, the lady who misspelled the names of the geniuses on the mural she was installing for the Livermore library? (or maybe Albert always spelled his name "Eistein," you never know.) Well, "Shakespere" and "Van Gough"'s families can rest easy, Ms. Alquilar slunk back into town last week to finally fix the mural. Alquilar, who had previously said she would never fix the mural because people had been so mean to her about it, was in a feisty mood in the blazing Livermore sun as she installed her new spell-checked tiles, threatening to throw a rock at the Chron's photographer and telling them, "No pictures of me! If I'm in it, I'm going to sue you." (Chron and Oakland Trib, you stinkers!) A city official politely said that Alquilar needed to be able to focus. (F-o-c-u-s.) Alquilar billed Livermore over $6000 for the privilege of re-edits, but we're sure Livermore residents have gotten more than $6000 worth of entertainment out of the whole thing. As one local teenage wag told the Chron, "When the story first broke, I thought, 'Oh, Livermore, the town that misspells stuff,' The only thing we've got in Livermore is a library that misspells words." ...

Well, we just heard Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" on the radio the other day (the kickoff song for the season), so it's official -- Santa Claus will be coming to town. And with him comes an assortment of Bay Area secular holiday entertainment -- kittens in the windows of Macy's, the Kristi Yamaguchi ice-skating rink at Justin Herman Plaza, caroling children thrown out of Union Square and then shamefacedly reinvited at the command of Mayor Gavvie Gav to sing at City Hall instead..... and how could we forget? Tap-dancing Christmas trees! The Oakland Trib profiles some of the more unique Bay Area Christmas entertainers, including the 28-member strong tap-dancing Christmas tree troupe, the trumpet-playing gorilla Santa Claus (he dresses up as Vampire Gorilla for Halloween), the Incredible Hulk Santa, and the Nerd Elf, among others. And The Standing Room gives us the lowdown on the itinerate life of the seasonal Dickensian caroler. (Who knew there were four verses of Jingle Bells?) So while you're frantically trying to get all your presents purchased (maybe at some of the stores we're profiling?), don't forget to kick back for a bit and enjoy the scene -- over a cup of scammed free cider from Williams-Sonoma. Pictures courtesy of The Standing Room. Check out that sexy tap-dancing Christmas tree hip-wiggle!...