--Turns out rescuers totally missed the car of the missing Alameda County woman and her priest friend, even though they got exact directions from 911. [Chron.] --An Oakland Tribune sports columnist apologizes for calling the A's racist. [92510; read the original column cached on Google here.] --Come to California, Barack Obama! [Calitics.] --A pedestrian was hit by an SUV at Folsom and Main. [A reader, who requested that we give you the link to WalkSF,......

--...and as promised, here's the back of the Ed Jew calendar, from reader Jake. Thanks, Jake! Irony alert! Can you guys see the "please contact me if you have problems or if issues concern you" tagline? --Fog City has heard rumors that Peskin might make Daly give up his position as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee. Meanwhile, the Sentinel reports that Daly misread the press release that Newsom's people sent out, and......

Hey, everyone -- here are the semi-arbitrary Top 5 Comments of the Week. For this, our fourth week of doing it, we thought it'd be a swell idea to try it out in easy-to-access text form. See below for commenters whom SFist's editors thought raised the game, made us laugh, or were otherwise notable, and click through to read the actual comments as written....

Last week's winner, as picked by SFist Sara L, the East Bay Express! A very deep Dream Cartoon about George Bush getting eaten by a shark. The Oakland military school is not military enough. Inspirational stories of East Bay kids getting scholarships. Cover: A sweet Oakland family stuck in a nightmare bureaucratic lawsuit hell over a mudslide that destroyed their house. Tripe soup in Fruitvale. A soulless book about 90s punk, and more debate about......

Well, all of San Francisco politics is trivial, isn't it? Get that confirmed at tonight's 4th Annual Political Trivia Contest, featuring Chris "Whiskers" Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, and Jake McGoldrick, at a benefit for the John Muir PTA, for a spelling bee for the Western Addition. Categories of questions include: "Streets (and Transportation) of San Francisco," "Interesting Characters of San Francisco," and, in a bracing slap of reality, "Only Trivia That A Policy Wonk Would......

The folks at NBC 11 gave Gavin Newsom a camera, and asked him to take photos of his life for their "Moving Pictures" series. During the promos, we started cracking up because there were all these clips of Gavin in full "woe is me" mode, talking about "compartmentalizing your personal life" and whatnot, set to really serious music. We expected the actual interview to include much of the same....

From yesterday's Chronicle article about Newsom stalker Han Shin: Inside [Shin's car], police found a map of San Francisco with the location of the mayor's building highlighted and a line following streets from the building to the Bay Bridge. Also found were a cutout composite photograph of the mayor, Shin and Shin's father, magazines with articles about Newsom, a laminated photograph of Newsom, three purple latex gloves and a cassette tape titled "President Newsom." Now,......

Bay Area Wanderer: Market and Church, San Francisco...

Dan Noyes: Is it true that you're leaving your position to start a hyphy group with your brother and John Nelson called the Ragone Clown Posse? ...

Here's our Caption Action entry for the picture above! Oscar winner Al Gore, Oscar-less Leonardo diCaprio, and our pick in the pool for Best Supporting Actor (in the role of John Nelson), Peter Ragone. And yes, you heard it correctly from commenter Ragone Has Resigned -- former mayoral press secretary Peter Ragone is leaving his recently retitled job as Director of Communications in City Hall to move up the street to work out of......

Back in 2005, SFist MattyMatt profiled local author Carl Hayes, who'd written an online novel about a Haight Street hipster transitioning into corporate culture. Well, a self-publishing press house has picked up Hayes' book, which can be purchased at fine online bookseller websites and is called The New and Improving Thomas. Adding to the SFist thrills, we've also profiled the man who shot the cover of the book, named Merkley. Here's Merkley's flickr shots of......

Peter Ragone: "Too bad I threw away my BlackBerry. I could be using it to comment on SFist right now."...

We've learned so much about mayoral communications director Peter Ragone from this article in the Sunday Chron! Since it's a Sunday (and there's no Swells today), we're naturally giving it the SFist By The Numbers treatment. Peter Ragone's generational suffix: III. Other Peter the Thirds we found in history include: a remarkably unpopular Russian tsar and a king of Portugal who married his own niece. Ragone's salary: $118,468. The article didn't say how much sick......

Well, whaddya know -- sorry for misrepresenting the accuracy of the SFWall gossip: Gavin Newsom is in fact going to Japan! According to press secretary Peter Ragone (so take it with a grain of salt), Newsom is leaving tomorrow and coming back on Tuesday -- hope he'll have a chance to catch cousin Joanna Newsom's Saturday Osaka show while he's there. Gavin's trip is occasioned by the 50th anniversary of San Francisco's sister city relationship......

There's not much going on in the Gavin front today, for which we praise the heavens for. Yes, we're as tired of this as you are, and, actually, that's got to be considered good for the Gavster as the more bored we are by it, the less we'll care about it. So today, we have Gavin paying Alex Tourk, the latest on Gavin's re-election chances, and Ken Garcia putting Gavin on the couch. ...

We've got it just as bad as you! Nevertheless, here's the three items we found in our listless online trolling today that still managed to catch our eye. --GavinWatch tries to shake off its unexpected pity for Gavin Newsom's personal plight with a little tribute to everyone's favorite press secretary -- wearing everyone's favorite color tie! Yay!! Rock it, Byorn! --The SFJunto chatboard is starting a (non-ironic) Gavin Newsom support group, where you pledge to......

Hey everyone, in the midst of all this Ruby Rippey-Tourk madness, guess who showed up for a photo session and interview with the Chron? That's right -- Peter Ragone's best friend and your correspondent's biggest fan, John Nelson! We always love to meet our readers! It's all somewhat anticlimactic, as Ragone's already admitted he posted all the comments listed under his IP address under John's name (and -- c'mon, we've got bigger fish to fry......

KCBS is reporting that Peter "Byorn" Ragone has finally copped to using all those fake names and admitted that all the postings as "John Nelson" and others was him. He also said he wouldn't do it again and would only post under his real name. We wonder if that means he'll go as "Peter Ragone" while posting on MTV's "Sweet Sixteen" message boards. ...

Hello there! You might know this correspondent as Gavin Newsom press secretary and SFist comment-spoofer Peter Ragone/John Nelson's "that rita chick is kind of weird" and subsequent KGO 7 fame. (!!!!!!) This whole thing is so bizarre -- you know, you go to one event where people show up in chicken suits and just look what happens! Did SFist really get name-checked at the Board of Supervisors' meeting yesterday???? So please pardon us if we've......

So we're moving up, media wise, as our little story about Peter Ragone and his sock puppet (now officially dubbed "SFistGate") will be airing sometime a little after six on ABC 7. How big is this story? Dan Noyes is giving it the special I-Team treatment. Actually, we know enough of this story to know it's going to be a good one. ...

We don't have anything funny to say about this one -- we're simply at a loss. Rumor had it yesterday that Gavin picked Stuart Sunshine to be his new Deputy Chief of Staff, and now the mayor's Director of Communications Peter Ragone (not to be confused with houseguest John Nelson) has confirmed it. Stuart will be leaving the MTA and moving to the mayor's administration, where he'll be "focusing on infrastructure and transportation." That's......

Some of you might have noticed a new commenter to the site, Peter Ragone. As in Gavin Newsom's communications director Peter Ragone. Now the first question some of you might have is "is it really him?" And the second question you might have is "doesn't he have better things to do with his time?" Well, we're pretty sure that most, if not all, of the comments in his name were made by him, since we've received second-hand confirmation that he's commenting on SFist. We don't, however, know if he has better things to do with his time. ...

"So I get this call back from Peter Ragone asking me not to call Gavin anymore, but would I like to be an intern?" By SFist Elaine......

As previously reported on SFist, today is the day the official, real Question Time is supposed to happen. Sometime today, the Board of Supes will read off all the names of people who should be in attendance and add one name to the list, that being Gavin's. Gavin won't be there, of course, because he will be at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, hobnobbing with the stars, both poltical and movie. His attendance at the confab, however, isn't going over very well with some people. ...

It's the return of our column where we compile all the attacks and defenses of Gavin Newsom in one handy place! This week it's all attacks, though. Send your Newsom defenses here! (or post 'em in the comments.) So... who's on this week's list? Let's bring 'em out! --Aaron Peskin and Ross Mirkarimi!: Luke Thomas at Fog City Journal reports that Supervisors Peskin and Mirkarimi decided to take advantage of Gavin Newsom's much-touted "open door......

We came across this video on GooTube for Propaganda New Year's Eve Party at Laszlo, featuring SFist fave Brittanie Mountz doing what she does best. Love the stunna shades, Brittanie! No confirmation on whether or not Mountz was actually there. And no word on what Gaviffer did for NYE, but we're guessing they probably went to bed at 1:30am with the rest of the over-25 crowd. Yawn. Special thanks to Peter Ragone for successfully breaking up Mountsome and ruining the best bit of blogging gold in 2006. We hate you, Peter! ...

We'd have a sad face too if the Chron came out against our position on Question Time, some mayoral pipsqueak in Santa Clara was out to eat our Niners lunch, and our chief of staff had just resigned because he'd been clashing with our minder Peter Ragone! (Though for full disclosure, this picture's almost two years old.) The latest news on the 2007 mayoral front? The Examiner went down to City Hall and got......

It's been a while since we had some good Gavin gossip and thankfully, we have some today. According to Matier & Ross, Gaviffer went out for a nice dinner at Panta Rei on Columbus and were all over each other. Lots of PDA, even. According to a couple of other diners, Gavin and Jennifer walked into restaurant arm-and-arm (note to SFist Rita: Gavin was apparently tie-less so we don't have to worry about what color tie he wore) and sat down side-by-side at the window. They then proceeded to make out, share pasta with each other and generally acted in the kind of behavior that would make one shout, "get a room." ...

It's another installment of.... Who's! Attacking! Newsom! Now! Where we compile all the negative things people are saying about the San Francisco mayor and report it in bullet form! We'll run a Who's Defending Newsom Now post next, as soon as we find someone defending Newsom, besides Peter Ragone. So here's the list! --Sean Elsbernd!: Newsom's erstwhile ally on the Board of Supes in District 7, Elsbernd is irritated that Newsom's new "let's fix the......

As you know, this correspondent is unabashedly in favor of this election season's Proposition I Question Time -- because we're in favor of anything that makes local politics entertaining! (We can discuss offline whether or not we thought it was a good idea when it was originally proposed, but given that it's out there now -- we're solidly pro!) We gotta have something to write about -- it's like how political cartoonists all voted......