So, it's the eleventh hour and you've decided against crushing up a couple of Ambiens into a mug of fume blanc and calling it a year. Instead, you've turned that frown upside down, choosing to see what's happening tonight on New Year's Eve 2008. Good for you. And to help you out, here are some last-minute events for each neighborhood in the San Francisco. Just follow links for more info; they will provide you......

Meet Joe Alioto Veronese...

Photo of a hummer...

Hey, remember that Question Time thingy? You know, that non-binding measure that voters passed which called for Gavin to appear in front of the Board of Supes and answer questions thrown his way while the rest of us get to kick back and watch the fun? Well, if you remember, Gavin kind of refused to do it and instead staged fake Question Time, "Town Hall" meetings throughout the city and wound up killing any sort of conflict over the issue by basically boring everyone to death. Even the chickens got bored and stopped attending. ...

So many characteristics contribute to Pacific Heights’ identity: affluence on eager display, giant square parks, commanding views, boutique shopping, dogs! dogs! dogs! But, one element up here is continually overlooked. Of course, we’re talking about portable latrines on sidewalks. With home construction such a constant in this district, and with so many laborers needing to “tend to personal business” throughout the long workday, it’s no wonder Pacific Heights walkways are lined with blue or turquoise fiberglass toilets. Jackson St. between Pierce and Scott, where three of the nine buildings on the block are currently undergoing some sort of makeover, and where each construction site features its own port-o-let, demonstrates our point as well as any in the area....

San Francisco socialites have been fellated for far too long by such hard-hitting glossies as 7x7 Magazine and San Francisco Magazine. Hell, even the pages from new society (excuse me, “philanthropy”) rag Benefit Magazine -- "the Lifestyle of Giving” is its tagline, God help us -- might lead you to believe that the upper crust would like nothing more than to head over to Bayview-Hunters Point and act as human shields from gunfire, saving the......

Modest, single-family homes. A cement mixer in one front yard. Security gates at the foot of several front stairwalks. Mercedes-Benzs everywhere you look. On this hilly block of Head St. in Merced Heights, where no vehicle even bothers with third gear, it’s clear where certain residents’ priorities lie...and often, it’s not in yard maintenance. But hey, check the ride in the driveway....

We are deeply, deeply regretful that the cityblog format had not been launched back in 2001 and 2002, when we were totally obsessed with the Diane Whipple dog mauling case. For those of you not here at the time, that was the case where a rugby lacrosse coach was killed by two fighting dogs kept as pets in a Pacific Heights apartment by two really loopy local lawyers, Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller -- and......

Playing the role of Shawn Fanning, minus the curls, the real estate retraction appears to be stealing theoretical dollars from the pockets of a member of Metallica. According to The Wall Street Journal guitarist Kirk Hammett has cut the asking price of his Pacific Heights mansion to a mere $10.5 million from the $12.5 million he'd been seeking since 2005....

A woman biking to work (with a helmet) suffered life-threatening injuries after being struck by a cement truck making an illegal right turn onto the 101 onramp at Market and Octavia Monday morning. The truck didn't stop, but a motorcycle cop subsequently caught up with the driver on 101 by the Cesar Chavez exit (and determined that the driver didn't realize he'd hit the woman). There have been a number of accidents at that intersection,......

Between a skyrocketing homicide rate, brutal and incompetent police, moves to completely redevelop the last community stronghold in The City, the shutdown of a school named after a famous local civil rights leader and disproportionate incarceration rates, black people just can't seem to get a break in San Francisco. Oh, sure, if you're a rich, womanizing Democratic party machine hack (or went out with one), or are willing to do illegal electioneering on The City's......

Submissions go to yvesdroppings - at - gmail dot com. Foreman: "We only have about half an hour of stuff left to do, so you can go ahead and start drinking, OK?" -- Transbay terminal construction site / Submitted by Adam "That just goes to show that you can be a chef with out being fat." -- On Fulton near USF / Submitted by Ryan Bookstore Clerk (on telephone): "I don't know. I'm not sure.......

In terms of showy San Francisco-based author biographies, J. T. Leroy's always had Danielle Steel beat. She may have a zillion parking spaces in Pacific Heights and some colorful marital history, but Leroy's alleged life story, complete with trailer-trash teen mother and lurid sex-n-drugs anecdotes, is both mediapathic and the purported foundation for his fiction. It is not, however, any sort of foundation for author appearances. Leroy's fishy public appearances are a postmodernist's wet......

In which SFist eats our way around the Bay Area in alphabetical order... Do you know how many eating establishments there are in San Francisco that begin with the letter Q? The answer is not many. You could probably count them all on three fingers. Our first thought, and choice, was to try out the renowned Michael Tusk-owned restaurant, Quince, in Pacific Heights. Rumour has it he offers a wonderful chef's table and as......

A drunken truck driver in Pacific Heights killed a cabbie and one of his passengers Sunday night. The trucker had been running stop signs and red lights all around Russian Heights, and had grazed a guy at Polk and Washington, without stopping. The hit-and-run victim was following the truck driver and saw him run head-on into a Yellow Cab at Broadway and Webster. The cab driver and the passenger in the front seat were killed; the two passengers in the back were taken to the hospital. The cab driver was a union organizer trying to get health benefits for other drivers, and the passenger was a senior at Duke who had gone to Indonesia to help out after the tsunami. Well, if you went to see A History of Violence, you might have at least been prepared -- moviegoers exiting the Jack London movie theater in Oakland last week were greeted by a hail of gunfire, as two rival Latino gangs shot out their differences outside the movie house. Moviegoers hid in the bathrooms as the gunshots shattered the glass doors, and one angry San Franciscan said, "Given that I live in San Francisco, I'd say there's a pretty good chance we'll skip the Jack London cinema from now on. There's a perfectly good movie theater in Emeryville.'' What, the Metreon's not good enough for you either? And a gay male cruising site has sued Paypal, because the online money collection service won't let them collect donations through their site for Katrina victims, citing their rule against using Paypal for sex-related businesses. CFS.com (Cruising for Sex.com; we assume it's NSFW) says it has two employees who have relatives affected by Katrina and had collected between $1500-2000 before Paypal pulled the plug. ...

Bundle up, ski bunnies -- looks like Jonny Moseley's 30th birthday Pacific Heights ski jump party, sponsored by Icer, is back on! After a contentious meeting of the SF Interdepartmental Staff Committtee on Traffic and Transportation, in which two hours of public comment were heard, the ISCOTT panel voted 8-0 in favor of the event, since all the permits had been obtained and all safety concerns met. There'll be 50 cops, a fully-staffed fire truck with 1000 feet of hose, and an ambulance nearby at all times. The party takes place Thursday the 29th -- jump practice starts at 10:30 a.m., the actual jumping goes from noon to 3:30 p.m., and the awards ceremony is at 4. Street closures will go into effect Wednesday at noon and run until 8 p.m. on Thursday. Picture of the Fillmore Street hill from the 1890s off the Fillmore Museum website...

So now that Laurie Beijan had her dream wedding at Flood Mansion uninterrupted by cries of "Tubular!" from outside -- what's going on with Jonny Moseley's ski jump plans now? The good folks of Pacific Heights called a public meeting yesterday, where some interesting things were said. On the one hand, there was the angry resident at Fillmore and Green, who says, "For my 30th birthday, I went to Mexico, got drunk, and learned how to surf. It didn't affect anyone." (Huh. Mexico.) On the other, there was the passionate Iranian immigrant who asked, "I can't help but wonder if there is a starving child in Africa or Taiwan who will watch this event and be drawn to San Francisco to make it their home." (Taiwan is actually doing OK on food these days, but thanks for asking). However, everyone agreed that no matter what happened, San Francisco is at least better than the rest of the country: "It is events like this that distinguish us from Kansas City, which is flat in every way," said one person, who said we had to have the jump so our city wouldn't be "boring." And all agreed that no matter what happened, it was probably the city government's fault as well. "This company went through San Francisco and got the proper permits. We should be angry at The City, not this company," said another resident. Icer is hoping to have the ski jump in Pac Heights still, on Sept. 29. ...

This just in! Newsom cancelled Jonny Moseley's 30th birthday party. Look at bummed-out Jonny over there -- doesn't he look kind of like Matty Gonzalez at that angle? Just a little bit? Newsom, always hedging his bets, said he was cancelling the event despite his own personal enthusiasm for it, mostly because of community concerns. The community (i.e., the monks, the Pacific Heights homeowners' association, and that extremely stressed-out Flood Mansion bride) are probably thrilled. All's not lost, though -- they could still maybe move it to Potrero! Picture from ABC 7 News...

Panic in the streets of San Francisco! Further adding to housing hysteria, the Chron prominently fronts an article reporting that the housing market is going to crash some time next year. Set your watches now, folks! Factors cited include an overreliance on zero-down interest-only mortgages, rising interest rates, and the sputtering U.S. economy in general. Plus, geez, how much higher can the market go, anyways? Picking a listing totally randomly, $939,000 for an 875 square foot house on 20th and Bryant?? (We apologize if this is your real estate investment, gentle readers.) Even the optimists are starting to sound a little nervous: an economist for the California Association of Realtors, who you know's gotta be the most up of anyone out there on the real estate market, concedes, "There may be some people who may get into trouble, but we don't think it will dominate the market." Gosh, we hope Third Eye Blind's Stephan Jenkins can move that Pacific Heights mansion of his before the inevitable market crash! ...

No doubt soon to become a regular column! The plebes who merely rent in Pacific Heights were no doubt circling the blocks fruitlessly Saturday night in a vain attempt to find parking as 400 members of the upper crust of the upper crust -- the part of the pie that turns black and falls off in the oven, it's so upper crust -- all drove separate cars to Gordon Getty's 71st birthday party. No word if Danielle Steel let people use any of her 26 parking permits for the evening. The house was bedecked in roses, just like when Ben Affleck proposed to J. Lo, and these folks are so A-list, you don't even know who they are:

Then you had my knowledgeable colleague, glam Anne Lawrence, who could have stepped right out of "The Aviator." Over there was skier, surfer, and jeweler Erin Dianda, who avatars as Alana Leigh. ... Don't forget that other California blond dream, Beth Townsend ... or those hard-working women whose good works give Society a good name: Vanessa Getty in white ... snow angel Donna Ewald Huggins ... Allison Speer ... Tatiana Sorokko, whose Russian allure fits right in with this house, which is right out of Tolstoy in its grandeur, hospitality and commitment to bringing people together. ...

In what is becoming a near-yearly holiday tradition, the lights are out in the Marina, Pacific Heights, and Russian Hill. PG&E says 13,500 people have their power out, probably due to a problem at the Marina substation. No word yet on the cause - and we're certain that it has nothing to do with SF's oh-so-tasteful power conservation measures. Update: A roving correspondant (or possibly a stumbling drunk) informs us that lights are on downtown,......

A weekly exercise in keepin' it real about the San Francisco drinkin' scene, by your local barrespondent, Drew. Whenever you're out knockin' back a few, it's always good to avoid the three 'C's. Crowds, Cleanliness and Cost. If you can spend a night out in the city and avoid all three of these evils, then the world is yours and all that's in it (or at least what remains in that dusty bottle of Macallan......

Oh, boo frickin' hoo. The Examiner today profiles an angry yuppie living across from the ballpark who says that a piece of graffiti is ruining his "million-dollar view." The disgruntled homeowner paid $850,000 for his tenth-story condo and says that the tag on the old warehouse across the street, reading "MORE BOOK$," appeared in April while he was on a business trip. ...

A weekly foray into the gentlemanly pursuit and spirited consumption of delicious beverages. In other words, a bar review column. By Andrew Lowder. Gentrification sucks. There, I said it. Actually, it's not a very controversial thing to say, is it? No one likes the idea of seeing their beloved, dirty, artistic crap-hole bulldozed over to make way for a Seattle's Best Coffee and a Quiznos. The only good thing about the dot-com crash of '99......

We're only getting to this story now because it takes four days for magazines to travel across our great lands to us yokels out here in the Western hinterlands -- the New Yorker deigns to focus its little monocle on the far end of Democrat-Blue America and presents a rather one-sided hagiography of our boy wonder mayor, Gavin Newsom. ...

Is it just us, or is it just sort of hilarious that a two-bed one-bath condo on 18th Street is being offered at $737,000 and a single-family house in Pacific Heights is listed at $4.9 million? While we're not quite as sick as New York, we're not really much better either. So, on the real estate as entertainment tip, EssEffist has been reading Carol Lloyd's Surreal Estate for a couple of years now....

Ever since SFist saw The 6th Day, we've been obsessed with the idea of cloning our pets (for those of you out there who haven't seen this cinematic masterwork, in The 6th Day, there's a company called RePet who will clone your beloved pet and grow it out to whatever age you'd like, so you and your family will never have to suffer the grief of pet loss again). We went so far as to keep a claw from our dearly departed cat around for such a purpose (that is, until we vacummed out the car and lost it forever)....