Oh boy, two things that excite us are coming together next week. No, not another divine marriage between peanut butter and chocolate. It's SF Chefs and the San Francisco Giants, and they're joining forces for a night of food and baseball. SF Chefs at the Park takes place on Tuesday, May 14 from 5 - 7 p,m. in Seals Plaza just before the Giants take on the Rockies. And it works like this, basically: you get to mingle with noted and award-winning chefs, sample their goods, and then you get to go the game, get drunk, and root for the greatest sports team of all time. Even if they are currently in second place behind the worst sports team of all time.

Your culinary lineup:

• Traci Des Jardins (Mijita / Public House / Jardiniere)
• Antelmo Faria (Tacolicious)
• Ryan Farr (4505 Meats)
• Laurance Gordon (ThirstyBear Brewing Company)
• Mark Gordon (Rose Pistola)
• Damon Hall (Pedro’s Cantina / Pete's Tavern)
• Robert Helstrom (Kuleto's)
• David Lawrence (1300 on Fillmore)
• Robbie Lewis (Bon Appétit Management Company)
• Elyce Zahn (CocoTutti)

Tickets to SF Chefs at the Park are priced on a sliding scale based on where you sit in the stadium, with tickets starting at $30 up to $175. Buy your tickets here. Partial proceeds will go to benefit local nonprofit food communities. See, everyone wins. Well, hopefully. Fingers crossed.

The Colorado Rockies moved (temporarily) back into first place in the NL West after beating the San Francisco Giabts with a 5-3 win today. Bah. As the Chronicle reports: "Through seven innings it appeared as though the Giants were going to get their sixth win in eight tries against the Rockies and leave town with a 1 1/2-game lead over their rivals," but things took a turn for the dreadful after a four-run eighth-inning rally. Bah. Whatever. It's still early in the season. Speaking of the Giants, your World Series champions will join the "It Gets Better" campaign by making their own video. Not sure what, if anything, the Giants know about being born gay and how it does, in fact, get better later on in life. But...you know, kudos to you, champs!

If there's anybody in the city taking more heat than Mike Nolan, it's his quarterback, Alex Smith. Smith stands accused by the Faithful of not very being good. The evidence? Overthrowing Receivers. Underthrowing Receivers. Not seeing open Receivers. The numbers back up the evidence-- he has a preposterously low QB rating (57.2) and completion percentage (48.7). He is also 11-19 as a starting QB. In the games we've watched, Smith looked like the same QB he was when he first started-- skittish and inaccurate-- so much so, the Faithful are muttering that Smith, as a #1 draft pick, has been a bust of Lucy Pinder-like proportions (sort of NSFW-y).

There are many theories out there for his general awfulness. Is he still hurt? Is the new offensive coordinator lame? Was the brief glimmer of decent play all due to Norv? He also played in a spread offense in college and there's a theory that QBs who play in gimmicky college offenses don't do well in the NFL. And maybe he just isn't a very good QB?

And speaking of #1 draft picks, there is the Raiders. The only reason to care about the Raiders right now is the eventual Coming of JaMarcus. After all, what else do Raiders fans have left to care about? The Raiders are like this season of "Heroes"-- boring and awful with only the possibility of something interesting happening towards the end as the only reason to keep watching-- Save the QB, Save the World. So why isn't the big guy playing? Is he not ready yet? Or maybe it's because whenever Al reappears from his cryogenic freezer, he mandates that the Raiders still need to just win, baby. After all, the AFC West is God-awful and a Raiders' Colorado Rockies-like run can actually send them into the playoffs and that probably won't happen with JaMarcus at the helm. Then again, it probably won't happen with Josh or Daunte and Andrew at the helm either.

Poor Cal-- so close yet so far. Our theory about what happened is that the idea of Cal having the #1 ranked team in the country was so crazy that even in this year (decade, actually) of sports craziness, the God of Sports deemed that just too crazy and set the upset in motion. Of course, we're also looking at the Rockies in the World Series, so whadda we know?

Okay, before the Raiders recap, here's a rant...if you've been following the baseball playoffs, especially the American League, it's been nothing but Yankees..Yankees...Yankees. When they lost to the Indians, the story wasn't "Cleveland beats the Yankees" but "Yankees lose to Cleveland." Then you'd watch ESPN and you'd have twenty minutes on the Yankees and at the most a few minutes on the Indians. Hell, if you watched ESPN after the Yankees were eliminated, you'd have difficulty knowing just who they lost too. Next time we turn ESPN on, we're half expecting a story to go "and this just in, the Yankees are still not in the playoffs." And now that it's Cleveland/Boston, it's the same thing all over again. After Game 2, the story wasn't Cleveland winning, it was Boston losing and why, as if the Sox were so destined to win and the fact they didn't was somehow they're doing, not the fact that the Indians are a pretty damn good baseball team. And even when watching the games, you barely know who the Sox are playing because not even the announcers on Fox acknowledge anything other than Boston.

And now...

Chargers 28 Raiders 14- The Raiders, it appears, had the misfortune of playing the Chargers not at the beginning of the season, but halfway through the season when a team many people consider Superbowl contenders finally got out of their stupor and realized that they're Superbowl contenders. Or, at least realized that their bread & butter is basically to do nothing than handoff to LaDanian Tomlinson, a cat who just kills the Raiders and did so to the tune of 198 yards (seriously, everytime we looked up, he was busting some twenty yard run). Something which would obviously be known by the Chargers coach, Marvelous Norv Turner, who used to see LT2 do it to him. As for the Raiders, they didn't play very well at all (Daunte was sacked 6 times) but it's hard to know whether they really are that good or whether they just got caught by one pissed-off Chargers team.

>Sorry to spread the bad news, Giants fans, but last night's 9-4 loss to the Diamondbacks mathematically eliminated them from the playoffs. We know, we know, wha? Well, statistically, the Giants could still have made the playoffs if they won every game up until the end of the season and the Padres, DBacks, Dodgers, and Rockies all came down with the Ebola Virus. Hey, it happens sometimes, sort of. In the Premiere League, Tottenham once got eliminated from qualifying for the Champions League when several key members of the team came down with a mysterious case of food poisoning.

So what's left in the season? Well, you know how people have been saying all season how much they'd like to see the kids play? The kids are playing-- those few times in which we checked out a game, we kept on wondering who the hell are the people on the field and what have they done to Ryan Klesko? In fact, the Barry, who's become kind of irrelevant to everything since he broke the record, isn't even playing much. It's like when the ratings were down on "The Facts of Life" and so the producers brought in some new students to highlight and made the regular crew more like supporting players than anything else. Didn't they open up a bakery or something? And didn’t Natalie lose her virginity to George Clooney? Man, that was a long time ago.

There will be a lot of post-mortems for the season sure to come, but we'll get things started. Lessons to be learned after the jump

Photo by Joey Bellville

Best Show ever and what made it great?
The last one we played - because it WAS great. Every show trumps the one before it.

Best venue?
Tie between The Backyard in Austin Texas (Willie Nelsons joint), or the Paradiso in Amsterdam - both are like little slices of paradise for bands on the road.

Which city has the best fans?
Anywhere in the Rockies territory. They're filthy cow folk and are ready to go at any moment. If you could see them through time-traveled lenses, they'd all have guns, horses, and missing a few teeth. All my rowdy friends and all that....

Lamest crowd request ever?
Show me your balls.

Favorite song to perform.
Never My Love - by the Association

It's over. Finished. Kapoot. As of this moment, we will no longer start to believe in you. Once again, for like the umpteenth and hundredth time, we started to think that you had turned the corner. That you had figured it all out, had put it all together and were about to go on the Big Run. You know, the run where you win like twenty out of twenty-five games and put the distance between you and the rest of the mediocrities that you run with in your division.

How could we not? After getting bitch-slapped around by the A's, you swept the Rangers, and then split a four game series against the Pads. Yeah, you only won two out of the four games, but you were two bullpen blowups from sweeping the series. Take away a couple of innings and you guys were playing great baseball-- good pitching, timely hitting, great D. Then you took the first game against the Rockies in a roller coaster of a game and it looked like you were still on a roll. Hell, all the guys on KNBR were talking about how much better you were playing. You were right there, with first place all yours for the taking.

And then, poof, just like that, you went back to your bad ways and got your butts kicked two games in a row. Your pitchers were getting hit, the fielders were dropping everything, and the offense went back to sleep. In Colorado, where every offense is the '27 Yankees, humidor rumors be damned. And now, once again, its snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity-- a team one game over .500. Here comes the angst again.

See, this is how it goes with you. You start playing well; you make Giants fans start thinking good thoughts, and then nothing. It hasn't been just this season; it's been like the past three seasons. Every time it looks like you are about to get it together and hope enters the craggy realms of consciousness, you start stinking up the joint again. And everytime we start thinking "okay, this time it's really going to happen," it doesn't.

Oh, Giants-- you are our Pam to our Jim. Joey to our Dawson. If you were a Bon Jovi song you'd be "You Give Love a Bad Name" and if you were a Neil Diamond song you'd be "Love on the Rocks." We can no longer believe you will ever come around.

Unless, of course, you go on a little tear and win like four out of five. Then, well, "Let's Go Giants!"

The tradition continues with the 10th Annual Dog Days of Summer on August 5th against the Colorado Rockies. But the competition hardly matters, what does matter is before the game all the dogs get to parade around the entire field – some dogs wear costumes - and nearly all the dogs get a moment of screen time on the huge scoreboard. The will be the first night game (6 p.m. start time) which means no more roasting in the hot sun in the outfield bleachers, which is nice. Special tickets are required so call 415-972-2356 to reserve your seats for this must do event for dogs.

After the game you can check out or next dog friendly bars – the 21st Amendment and Hennessy’s Wine Shop on 2nd near Brannan. The 21st Amendment beer garden is only open on game days but welcomes the canine crowd with a water dish out front and lots of food to beg, we mean, choose from. Hennessy’s, on the other hand, is about as dog friendly as they come with free treats behind the counter, free treats from the deli floor and a nice outdoor patio in back. 21st Amendment gets 2 St. Bernards while Hennessy’s earns 4 St. Bernards, our highest rating. Check it out if you are in the South Park area.

The only thing missing from this full-blown summer are the extra hours we lost to Daylight Takings Away a couple weeks back. (Did you know the federal government has already legislated extending Daylight Savings? Of course it's a phase-in thing that will not begin for 2 years, but it's already been approved ;) On top of the perfect weather perhaps you've noticed the moon lately. At the horizon it's been appearing bigger than a basketball and over head it's been so bright you could read an ironic mission bohemian's t-shirt from 25 feet. Of course all this dry warm fall weather also means it's fire weather - especially in the east bay hills where temperatures have reached in the 80s the last 7 days - so watch those cherries.

If you're in town next week and have some time off, take advantage of the quiet roads and consider getting outside as the weather should be great. It would be a great time to hike, bike or kayak in Point Reyes and Tomales Bay. Big Basin on the way to Santa Cruz and Henry Coe just past Gilroy both have nice late season camping and hiking. Of course our favorite November camping/hiking locale is Pinnacles National Monument. The eastern campground rarely ever fills up, the central valley air is warm and the hikes around the ancient epic extinct volcano are always astounding. Watch where you place your hand, however as tarantulas like it there too, though they are completely harmless in these parts. Locally, if you want to stay in Ess Eff and enjoy the ample parking and uncrowded roads, the Conservatory of Flowers is always transporting geographically as the nearby Japanese Tea Garden is spiritually. Baker, China and Chrissy Field offer great in-city beaches and quick trips down or up Highway 1 will cure what ails you ... every time. Enjoy!