You know what really grinds our gears?...

Photo of official SF vehicles parking on a sidewalk...

Coming out of the Fall Out Boy/Gym Class Heroes/Plain White T's concert (which we'll cover later) we ran into the Invisible Children's van. Pete Wentz, an avid supporter of the organization that helps Uganda's children, talks about this at all of his concerts. He raises awareness and asks for donations, sells emo-inspired t-shirts, sweatshirts and anything else that 13 year-old fans want. (Kudos to him!) Apparently there is even a van that helps promote......

Perhaps in an effort to appease the masses for screwing them over on insane parking ticket allocations, the San Francisco Police Department, the Mayor's Office, and city prosecutors are working together to stop the city's most "overlooked crime": smash-and-grab auto burglaries. (Also known as "Boosts." Oh, that's fun name!) With an average of 41 smash-and-grabs per day in SF, the Mayor's office created a special task force that arrests one boost-happy hoodlum per week,......

Do you have any information? A Fremont family is trying to get some answers about the circumstances of their father's mysterious death. The father suffered a heart attack at Van Ness and Market on June 5, and died five days later without ever regaining consciousness. The mystery is that they cannot find the car their father drove into the city that day. They have a garage parking ticket they found in his pocket, but it......

According to NPR, it seems both Los Angeles and San Francisco are in the habit of slashing the tires of and beating the crap out of our dear meter maids -- now more than ever before. The absurdity of SF's parking ticket-dispensing habits aside, this is awful. A year ago, we saw a couple of altercations on Valencia Street, with vile douche bags puffing up their flaccid feathers at hard-working meter maids (meter-men? parking......

What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week. Being the nation's capital, DCist felt especially proud to let freedom ring this week by exposing the really important issues, like how sad they......

Look at that fresh new picture of your 2007 San Francisco Board of Supervisors! Chris Daly even showed up this time! So what's the gang up to these days? (Besides Chris Daly; he's old news.) Here's an update: Bottom row, left to right: Michela Alioto-Pier: Giving medical marijuana stores more time to apply for permits. Bevan Dufty: Pleading with Chris Daly in vain about moving wi-fi forward. BoS Pres. Aaron Peskin: Making it more......

Some video to amuse you as you kill your Friday afternoon at the office: Schlomo Rabinowitz suggests what not to buy for your little pisher this holiday season, and Josh Wolf posts his footage of the latest anti-war protests. Speaking of motion pictures, somebody has paid Malcolm Gladwell $1 million for the movie rights to Blink. We can't believe it either. El Lefty Malo takes a look at the public cost of privately built......

There's no denying there's a certain luxury to the automobile. You leave the house when you want; there's no waiting in the howling wind vainly straining your neck to see if that N Judah's ever going to peek its little head around the corner; you always have a seat.... But the downside of driving is, of course, the DPT. Come take a hilarious tour of the Kafka-like bowels of parking enforcement with Gavin Newsom in today's Chronicle! Where an average of 565 people per day routinely wait in line for over an hour to find out.... that they're in the wrong line! One man profiled in the article waited for two and a half hours before leaving in disgust, and another man had already waited over two hours for a parking permit. Part of the problem is that they make it difficult for people to pick up, complain about, or pay for anything in any other way other than in person. Another part of the problem is that they've only got 37 people (they're 15 people short) working to process over two million parking tickets a year. Yet another part of the problem is that for some reason, they never got around to installing one of those "take a number" systems so that you wouldn't have to actually stand there in line like someone waiting for Phish tickets. Anyways, Gavin Newsom stopped by earlier this week and spluttered, "It's an embarrassment. I should go even further: It's absolutely unacceptable. There's no excuse." The icing on the cake? Because the lines are so long and there's no real way to get to Howard and 10th conveniently on public transportation, almost everyone gets a parking ticket at the 60-minute-limit meters on the street. Follow the sad saga of the man crying out, "Oh s---!" as he watches from the line as his car gets another ticket slapped on the front! ...

Back in the 1970s, everyone was talking about Traffic Commissioner Jerry Levitin. Commish Levitin, a former criminal defense attorney, spent the decade of stagflation reducing or just outright vacating over 200,000 tickets, and giving what sounded like hilarious colloquies from the bench about the injustice of the San Francisco DPT. Loved by the people! Hated by government! So in 1980, when Levitin was preparing to run for a Superior Court judgeship, KRON came out with a report that Levitin had been lowering parking ticket fees for his political supporters. The report was wrong (Levitin had been reducing parking fees for everyone, supporters and detractors alike), but in the meantime, he lost his job at the traffic court and the DPT went back to its red-zone-enforcing ways. At the time, Levitin wrote a play about his experience -- which sat unproduced for the next 15 years as he and his wife moved to Maine to start a B&B and write travel books. Well, after 15 years, the play has finally been staged (with some help from Kamau Bell), at the Shelton Theater. Called "I'd Kill for a Parking Place," it's described as a murder mystery-comedy "written for revenge," starring a beleaguered traffic court commissioner. You know we gotta see this! Our review's after the jump. Thanks to Bruce Pachtman for his support of our coverage!...