* Jacksonville vs Pittsburgh Saturday, January 5, 5:00 PM PST Wild Card 2008 The Purists' Battle This is the game that John Madden has been eeeagerly awaiting. A matchup of two classically built, smashmouth NFL franchises in a cold weather playoff game. Pound the rock. Control the line. Stick 'em on D. This is a football game for the NFL purist. Can't wait. Photo via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette......

Oh this is a smashing idea. Jennifer Gooch's site One Cold Hand reunites missing single gloves with their owners. Yay! Since her site opened in March of this year, her finds have spiked considerably since winter began last month. And so has her press coverage: the New York Times, USA Today, and the Associated Press, to name just a few, have all picked up on OCH so far. The AP article notes that Gooch's......

It really is all about the other side of Market Street now. Along with neighborhoods that we've heard of before like Pike Place in Seattle; Hillcrest in San Diego; and Park Slope in Brooklyn, N.Y. -- our xenophobia runs deep, folks -- as well as hoods that we've never heard of such as Chatham Village, Pittsburgh; Eastern Market neighborhood of Washington, D.C.; Elmwood Village in Buffalo, N.Y.; and Old West Austin in Austin, our......

Ahhh, crap. During this week’s practice, 49er OLB Manny Lawson tore an ACL and will be out for the 2007 season. This is a mighty blow to the nascent Niner defense, who had been counting on the former first-round pick to lend his 6’5” frame and sprinter’s speed to the linebacking corps this year....

SFist interviews artist Andy Vogt. His latest work is showing at Swarm Gallery in Oakland....

We're going to do this a little differently this time around as we don't know who really cares that much about either team right now. Instead, we're going to point out why you should still care. So here’s our Top 5 Reasons to Still Watch the Giants. ...

Let's get everyone ready for tonight's big Warriors Game. ...

Here's todays wrapup of sports news...

Hey, did you hear we're hosting the All-Star game next year? If you watch any of the Giants' games on TV (and who would, all things considering), they only mention it like twenty times a game. Last week they had some big brouhaha with Hizzoner Gavin to unveil the logo and if you go to a Giants game, they have signs everywhere and some clock to let you know that, like, there are only 362 DAYS UNTIL THE ALL-STAR GAME!!!!! ...

One of the more amazing facts about Bay Area Craigslist is its complete ubiquity. It is almost to the point where you can't live your life with it. How do people find rentals? Craiglist. How do people shop for goods? Craigslist. In other words, we have it pretty gosh-darn nice here. We don't need to search multiple web sites to find apartments, nor do we need to look at newspaper classifieds to find used bicycles. Instead we have a single omnipresent source (with a nice search engine to boot!) which does all of this for us. The rest of the world is not so lucky. Let's say that, for some crazy, crazy reason, you are looking for housing in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that LA has many times the population of San Francisco, it only has half the housing listings that the Bay Area does. Or, hypothetically speaking, lets say we wanted to find a pick-up soccer game in San Diego. Ugh. There are a third as many community listings in San Diego as there are in the Bay Area, despite the fact that they have roughly the same population. Or say you want to do anything in Pittsburgh, PA, St. Louis, MO or Tampa, FL? Well, you are out of luck finding it on Craigslist. To put this in perspective, only one of the top 10 city areas in the country (New York) has more listings than the Bay Area. Wow. SFist Nick, contributing. All numbers, ratios, etc. were computed 04/09/2006. Image from artoftravelworldwide.com ...

The NCAA men's basketball tournament resumes tonight with third-round (also known as the Sweet 16) action in both the Atlanta and Oakland regionals. Action in the Washington D.C. and Minneapolis regionals continue tomorrow and Saturday....

O sweet joy, it's time for the Super Bowl! Yes, the pageantry, the power, the one thing that will hold the American football world enrapt this Sunday: Super Bowl XL. Pittsburgh vs. Seattle (in Detroit) Sunday, February 5, 2006 The Battle For Proof ...

It’s about that time again (for the first time). Time to heap a whole year’s worth of praise on to several lucky and talented establishments that did us the kind service of getting us drunk. Yes indeed, ‘tis the season for recognizing the best of the best, the places that don’t settle for second place, that realize life is a marathon not a sprint, and any other clichéd ‘successories’ slogans you can think of. Crack-a-lack-a!!......

Let's just come right out and say it: the Giants, now 8-10, had a crappy week. They went two-and-five against teams that, even without Barry Bonds (whose return is still shrouded in steroid-enhanced mystery) and Moises Alou (who returned to action on Friday night and hit his first homerun as a Giant on Sunday), they should have won at least four games. Until this point, the Giants' offense had been the bright spot of the......

Before a disappointingly small, but vocal and ultimately happy crowd at the Coliseum Wednesday night, the A's fought off a series sweep at the talons of the Toronto Blue Jays. Nick Swisher led the way with two hits, one of which was a monster home run to rightfield, and Jason Kendall, whose bat may have finally arrived from Pittsburgh, added two hits and two RBI of his own. Joe Blanton went six innings and......

Making official something that's been talked about for months, Major League Baseball today announced that the 2007 All-Star Game will be held at the Stadium Formerly Known as Pac Bell Park. Isn't it nice to have some news about Bay Area baseball that doesn't involve injecting things in people's asses? The Giants last hosted the Midsummer Classic in 1984 and also held one in 1961, a game remembered primarily for pitcher Stu Miller getting blown off the mound by the Candlestick wind....

Okay, maybe we're no better than the steelworking philistines in Pittsburgh, but we somehow doubt that the entire audience at "Hairy Bodies" will be primarily there for the exhibit's intended purpose: to look "at individual and group complexities, differences, and dynamics." Um, yeah, we'll be sure to check out those group complexities, just as soon as we're done ogling all the squeezy, scratchy pecs. Mmmmmmm. The group exhibiton at The Lab's nifty gallery opens January......

Dan Leone hits us right in the gut with Giordano Bros. -- we're not familiar with the Pittsburgh all-in-one like they serve at Primanti Brothers. We'd have to defer to Mr. Kavanagh on that one. But the idea of stuffing the french fries into the sandwich appeals to us on so many levels that Giordano Bros. seems an inevitability, especially if they stayed open just a little later. The other Guardian foodie, Paul Reidinger, hits......

It's Tuesday again so the Essefficist is back with more Q&A for our loyal readers. Today we bring you answers to your questions about weird hamburgers and pruney toes. Also, for all you nasty freaks out there, we return one last time to the sordid world of Craig's List horndogs. First, we turn to Anonymous SFist Reader, who wonders, Is there anywhere in town I can get a cheap (less than $10) ostrich burger? Preferably......

Weekly football wrap-up....