Old hippy dude throwing down with a yuppy at a Michael Pollan talk. In Palo Alto! A small skirmish errupted when the bolo tie wearing hippy was upset by the yuppy not volunteering a saved seat (turns out was saving it for his mom) for an elderly gentleman. Things got good when sunglasses were grabbed, and Stanford students intervened. Isn’t eating well supposed to make you less angry? Oh, and the talk was really......

How will this weekend's Transit Camp affect you, the average beleaguered bus rider? In lots of ways: better websites, nicer maps, smarter rides, and information customized exactly to your transit needs ... which all adds up to you getting where you're going, faster and happier. Or at least, that's how it'll be if the Transit Camp evangelists can convince transit agencies to play along. The event is a sort of meeting-of-the-minds between transit-happy hackers......

Wow, one show on Monday and twelve on Friday. This week we definitely start off a bit slow, but by the end of the week, we have a ton of choices. Wednesday, there is the sold-out Ingrid Michaelson show that had to be moved from Cafe du Nord to Slim's because apparently everyone is into "librarian chic" right now. Though it's sold-out, you can still find tickets on craigslist; the prices aren't too inflated, yet.......

San Francisco's musical offerings were bountiful Wednesday night ranging from Film School to Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings to The Thermals. It seems, though, that most of you made the correct choice: Vampire Weekend. Now we don't doubt that the other shows weren't amazing -- we were pretty miffed that there were so many choices on one night -- but clearly if you are anybody then you were wearing a blue pin-striped shirt, dark......

Pitchfork has a rich article Fugazi's Joe Lally having thousands of dollars worth of equipment stolen from his touring van while it was parked on Valencia Street. Overnight. Fugazi's Joe Lally and Philly's Capillary Action were enjoying a nice stop over in San Francisco following a shared gig on their current tour when tragedy struck. November 16, between the hours of 3-10 a.m. on the corner of Valencia Street and Clinton Park, someone broke......

No, there was no collision involving a train. However, a garbage truck apparently struck a bridge in San Mateo, holding up all southbound traffic for about 20 minutes. At first, our weary-sounding conductor said that we would have to wait for a track inspection to determine when we could depart from San Francisco -- "if at all," he added ominously. We're now rolling south about 20-30 minutes behind schedule, pulling into Millbrae at the scheduled......

Three weeks ago, a Caltrain conductor told the San Jose Mercury News that "Trains stay on tracks and if you stay off the tracks, it's very easy not to get hit by a train" ("Family of Man Killed in Caltrain Accident Files Suit"). Let's hope that no one got hit today -- trains are running at least 20 minutes late in both directions. These folks are waiting at the Palo Alto train station at......

Todd David Burpee, the man who kidnapped and raped a Palo Alto teen last week, just busted out a heavy confession detailing the hour-plus moments he spent with his victim. It seems that this was all because he was upset and "just [wanted] someone to take out his frustration on after a fight with his girlfriend," reports the San Jose Mercury News. They go on to say that "angry after a fight with his......

According Eric Thomas from ABC 7, who went into mighty graphic detail about what happened, a suspect was arrested today for the kidnapping and rape of a 17-year-old Palo Alto teen. A press conference is scheduled at noon (now!), where even more details, names will surely unfold. This past Wednesday a teen was kidnapped in Palo Alto, taken to Sunnyvale (on the 500 block of Fair Oaks Avenue), and then sexually assaulted. She survived......

Readers responded with light speed and razor-sharp accuracy (more or less) when it came to detailing last night's devastating -- body-wash-plummeting-to-the-earth devastating! -- 5.6 quake. We will all look back on October 30, asking ourselves, where were we when the great 5.6 quake of '07 hit? Well, after sending out the we-hope-you're-still-alive-and-kicking call to the SFist team at large, they responded. Here are a few of the shattering moments in the lives of some......

A Palo Alto high school girl survived a kidnapping and sexual assault yesterday afternoon, an ordeal that went on for 90 minutes. At 3 p.m. yesterday, a teen was on the "500 block of Arastradero Road near El Camino Real...near her home, when a man accosted her from behind, hit her in the face several times and dragged her into his car," according to Palo Alto police officer Dan Ryan. The city of Palo......

Update: Oh damn! The video's not working. It's a compilation of all the various calls we've gotten. We'll try re-uploading it when we get home from work. If you're like everyone else on the planet, you've been getting endless recorded calls about carpet cleaning. "Hi, this is Allison, blah blah blah, press 8 to schedule a carpet cleaning," the recording goes, or it's "Dave" with the same spiel. Sometimes it's "account services" calling about......

-- Good God, Genesis (alas, the band) is back. [BeyondChron] -- HA! Even bunnies know that square-mouthed Giada De Laurentiis is a wee bit porn-y at times. [CHOW] -- San Leandro teen killed in car crash on (the) 680. [Chron] -- Gap laptop stolen along with the personal data of over 800,000 retail queens. Whoops. [Examiner] -- Party poopers: Apple brings down the hammer on hacked iPhones. (Dear AT&T, Hate you much. xo, us)......

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. ...

Wow, sorry all the news we're posting today is such a downer, but San Jose is reeling from the news of the brutal sexual assault and murder of Sany San, a recent Cambodian immigrant who had survived the Khmer Rouge. Last Sunday, San had walked a mile from her home in East San Jose at 6 a.m. to catch the bus to her job as a janitor at a doughnut shop in Palo Alto when......

SFist Wendy skips Harry Potter for the SF Jewish Film Fest! Who woulda thought. . . . we weren’t the only ones not completely immersed in isolation with the final Harry Potter book this weekend... although we did see a couple books neatly tucked under the seats at the Castro Theater on Saturday at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. If you weren’t there, well, then you missed out on a couple of good romantic......

--We're up to 130 Galaxies now. [picture from the Fillmore Jazz Fest this weekend by megac0rp, from the SFist Flickr stream.] --Huge fire on University Avenue in Palo Alto; officials suspect arson. [Merc News, Palo Alto Daily News.] --A drag Loretta Lynn? Awesome! [Civic Center.] --Building housing over the main Caltrain station. [The Examiner.] --The return of the N-Judah to Mission Bay seems to have worked okay. [Chron, N Judah Chronicles.] --31 layoffs at......

--One person is dead after a Caltrain hit a car in Palo Alto this afternoon. [CBS 5, Merc News.] --The Lauryn Hill show sucked. [The Chron, All Shook Down, the Inside Bay Area Buzz blog.] --What's Berkeley going to do after this Supreme Court ruling? [The Trib.] --Blogging from the iPhone line in Walnut Creek. [Contra Costa Times.] --A fight over a local grad student's blog post about racial and class divisions on MySpace and......

--This is an awesome picture from the Pride celebration yesterday. [37°C (we learned how to make the degree sign! Thanks, commenters!), from the SFist Flickr stream.] --Left in SF's Robert Haaland had fun as one of the grand marshals for Pride -- even though he didn't actually ride in his own car!. [two posts on Left in SF.] --People who read local real estate blog Socketsite are rich. [Socketsite.] --Remember the guy who drove......

--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......

--Check out Ross Mirkarimi's Gavin hair! Didn't someone else try this too? --When is a dognapping a terrorist act? (Hint: animal rights activists may be involved). --Apple TV isn't doing so well --Tapioca Ed turns in his residency paperwork to the SF City Attorney a day early. --Keep affairs on your own side of the bridge! People are starting to subpoena Fastrak records in divorce cases. --It's queer senior prom at the LGBT Community......

--As you may have heard in the comments to the latest Oh No, Ed Jew! column, MUNI is thinking about having the N go out to the Caltrain station again. Yay! We may cover this again on SFist later too. --It's BART's 50th birthday!! Oddly enough, it's soy sauce maker Kikkoman's 50th birthday too. Also turning 50 today: John Treacey, Irish athlete. (Today is also Angelina Jolie's birthday, but she's not turning 50.) --SFMike......

A realtor called Chris Iverson was commenting on the "death of the newspaper industry" over at the 3 Oceans real estate blog. You may think "who the hell is this guy" to comment on the state of ink media. We'll tell you: He's one of the guys that pays (or perhaps used to pay, based on the entry) for ads in the classified sections of newspapers...

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......

With "Survivor" out of the way, we can now concentrate on "The Bachelor: Officer and a Gentleman." Oh joy! We'll admit we've been reading a lot of gossip about the show, rife with spoilers, and while those spoilers might not be true, we kind of think they are. We won't spill the beans here, but we'll just say it's kind of taken the suspense out of the whole thing. And we'll also add: we......

In 1938, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started a company from a garage in Palo Alto. Hewlett-Packard is now a household name, a tech giant, and a Silicon Valley fixture. And now the place that started it all has been given a "Historic Place" designation by the National Park Service....

Well, some pretty good news for teachers in Ravenswood City School District: their union has managed to get them a little more scratch. ...

It's not an exaggeration to say that some families are held together by dough. Our grandmother for instance, used to bake scrumptious apple tarts to lure her philandering husband back home. It seems however, that the dough-kneading gene did not make it to our batch of DNA. So we 're always on the lookout for some good ready-made. Despite its strong following, we felt completely let down by Trader Joe's 99-cent whole-wheat dough: once rolled, we could not get it to remain stretched. In fact, its ability to retract to the touch reminded us of garden snails when you poke their soft parts. Fortunately there is the onomatopoeic Patxi's Chicago Pizza. ...

At around 3 o'clock or so on Sunday, Palo Alto gave a huge sigh of relief as the Cardinal made it into the Big Dance, being seeded 11th in the South Regional. Their first game is against the sixth seed, Louisville (23-9). No time has been set, but the game will be on Wednesday. ...

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......