Happy birthday, Leap Day babies! Since it's leap day, there's the obligatory quadriennial articles about how people born today are 75% younger than the rest of us, and the Chron is no exception. The bissextile among us include Dinah Shore, Ja Rule (holla!), Antonio Sabato Jr., and... San Francisco fire chief Joanne Hayes-White! more ›

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-- Dreamgirls: Jennifer Hudson's performance as Effie White won her an Academy Award, and her end of Act I nervous breakdown ("And I Am Telling You") blew audiences to the back wall of the theatre. . She is the reason to see this movie. It also features Anika Noni Rose, a former A.C.T. student. Check out this musical loosely based on the rise of the Supremes tonight at 7 p.m. at the Castro Theatre, Castro and Market Streets; $9.50. more ›

From the Chron's Peter Hartlaub, we get word that the Castro Theater is going to be showing all three movies of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Yep, that's Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King back-to-back-to-back. And yes, that's a lot of movie watching but if you were going to watch like eight hours of movies, you couldn't do wrong there. Name another movie trilogy that's even as half good as these three, come on we dare you. The Godfather Trilogy? Godfather III. Star Wars IV-VI? Ewoks. American Pie I-III? Not even close-- hell, Tara Reid wasn't even in the last two. See, the way we see it is it'll be cold, the stores will be mayhem, we've already seen "A Christmas Story" over twenty times, and we have no life. What could be better than 559 minutes of Middle Earth-goodness? Show starts at 1:30. Tickets are $10 more ›

A decorating bug hit us hard and unexpectedly. We aren't usually the decorating type. We know we're not the only ones seeing the Evites and rare fancy paper invites pour in'food accompanied by virgin or adult drinks, yes!-- for upcoming holiday shindigs. Maybe we've drank the Bud's eggnog too much, but we feel it's fun to sometimes do the inviting ourselves. We on whim suddenly motivated last night and decided to decorate a little since we have guests in town this weekend. We're hosting a brunch in their honor on Sunday. Our message: don't freak out over having people over. We are not as calm and collected as we'd like to be, either. But hey, the Human League said it best (tho the topic was decidedly different), we're "only human." Our fool proof tips for getting in the holiday mood by decorating your place: more ›

"Gimme head with hair/ Long beautiful hair/Shining, gleaming/Streaming, flaxen, waxen..." In 1906, we had the Big One. In 1989, we had Loma Prieta. In 2004, we had the Winter of Love. In 2006? Gavin let his hair down. As Peter Hartlaub wrote in the Chron: "Where Were You the Day Gavin Changed His 'do?" Well, we here at SFist were all over the story, giving you the breaking news that his hair was de-gelled and then giving you the breaking news when he became gelled again. Then, of course, there was the debate: did he look more like Matt Gonzalez or Nick Carter? How come nobody thought of the obvious Clay Aiken 'do? And for those of you who wondered why there wasn't anything else important going on, we covered that too-- the new do of Gav's 20 year-old girlfriend. more ›

We haven't done one of these in awhile! more ›

With the advent of this Internet thingamabob, newspapers are finding themselves in quite a world of Darwinian hurt. In short, adapt or die. Lately, the Chron has been adapting by having some of their most favored writers do blogs on the SFGate side. Not a bad idea really as we're sure the idea of paying $30 a year to read Jon Carroll's cat columns is not going to bring in the cash money. How they've been getting the writers to do it is a good question as we have a feeling not many of them were that psyched on the idea. We're thinking either by gun point or with long-lost incriminating photos. more ›

Summertime of Poverty pens a lyrical reflection on the modern world, but the title says it all. On that note, Ron Gonzalez gives a final state-of-San Jose speech, and San Jose Inside readers take the opportunity to lament his tenure. Up north, Michelle Slatalla plays with new real estate tool Zillow, but while intrigued, is not impressed by the inaccurate data. more ›

This is how it works: newspaper or news show, you know the evil MSM, does a story riddled with factual inaccuracies. The story then out there, bloggers go wild, give cries of (depending on one's political affiliation) "liberal bias"/"corporate cave in", and demand scalp. Retraction is given, mistakes acknowledged, scalp proffered, and bloggers do victory dance. So it's time for bloggers' powers to activate. On the way into work, we were reading the Chron's Peter Hartlaub's otherwise highly enjoyable piece on used CDs and how they can reclaim one's cheesy musical past, something we could definitely relate to, when we looked at the accompanying photos of the cheesy musical past he is reclaiming. Shown are cds of Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell", Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet," and Guns N' Roses mighty "Use Your Illusion II." But it's not what he listed that got our goat, it's the captions. Because he has "Rebel Yell" coming out in 1990, "Slippery" in 1999 (!), and "Use Your Illusion II" as coming out in 1997. Great googly moogly! more ›