Police believe that a Santa Rosa man, who recently stabbed himself with a homemade spear just seconds before the fuzz burst through his front door early Sunday morning, is possibly connected to last Thursday's carjacking and rape incident involving a 29-year-old mother. According to the Gate, "Aristotle Quadra, 30, faces charges of carjacking, kidnapping, sexual assault and attempted murder. He is being held at a Santa Rosa hospital while being treated for self-inflicted stab......

We caught Phil Setzer, the violinist for the Emerson String Quartet, being driven down between performances in Santa Barbara and Orange County. We hope it was in a stretch limo, as these guys have won eight Grammy awards and critical acclaim everywhere they go. They are the only chamber music group to ever win a best classical album grammy, and they even got two. So they better travel like the rock stars they are. They'll......

The Mission's an interesting place to screen a movie about gentrification, filmed from the eyes of the gentrifier -- so there was certainly no shortage of things to think about at last night's showing of New Urban Cowboy for DocFest at the Roxie. New Urban Cowboy is a documentary about Michael Arth, a kind of hippie-dippie former resident of Santa Barbara who moves to the small town of Deland, Florida, near Orlando, and more......

We don't actually know if anything on this poster, taped to a utility box at Fulton and Stanyan, is true, and we certainly don't want to entangle ourselves into the story by calling to verify. The epic tale is exhausting and an obvious drama-trap -- so let's sum it up: Someone feels that some girl named Jennifer took advantage of them. But it's not like they made it very hard for Jennifer to do: ...she......

This is the first post in a new, regular series that will feature discarded items plucked from Bay Area streets, flea markets, thrift stores, and other nooks and crannies. In the spirit of Found Magazine, the U.K.'s Is This You?, and the FoundPhotos community in Livejournal, we call on you to submit your interesting Bay Area finds, including photos, objects, and letters to found.at.sfist.dot.com. In order to be considered, please tell us where you found the item and any other info you would like to include. (Remember, it has to be an item whose previous owner was unknown.) This featured collection is by far one of our favorites that we picked up at Community Thrift a couple of years ago. We were told by people in FoundPhotos that the landscape in the photos appeared to be in Santa Barbara, a mission and a winery, respectively....

Several days ago, two falcons, George & Gracie moved from their tony climes in lower Market and set up shop on the Bay Bridge where they just recently laid some eggs. This, said bird officials, is not good. The reason is pretty simple enough: it's not a great place to raise kids. We mean, the views maybe great but it's not the safest neighborhood and hasn't been a trendy place to live since the early 90's. Actually, it's not a safe place to live because it's really hard for the baby falcons to learn how to fly because the winds are too strong. So today, crack members of the UC Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group went up a tower in the Bay Bridge and rescued the eggs. ...

Levi Leipheimer successfully defended his gold leader's jersey yesterday in Stage 6 of the 2007 Amgen Tour of California (TOC), but it was Team CSC that commanded everybody's attention. Refusing to concede a single pedal stroke to Leipheimer or his Discovery Channel team, CSC kept the stage hopping with steady pressure on the front from veteran scrappers like Bobby Julich and Stuey O'Grady. For their efforts, CSC locked up the overall team classification and propelled their TOC sprint man Juan Jose "JJ" Haedo to his second stage victory of the tour.

Running 169.6 kilometers (km) from Santa Barbara to Santa Clarita across challenging terrain that included four King of the Mountain (KOM) category climbs, two points sprints, and three 5.6-km circuits to finish, Saturday's Stage 6 featured nonstop, granular action motivated by visions of personal glory and dedication to team and teammates.

This season of Top Chef on Bravo has been marred by stupid controversy. The whole Otto/Marisa/stolen lychee thing. The "did someone cheat? Let's eliminate nobody" challenge results. Mia's going postal a few weeks ago. And now Cliff's attempted prank on Marcel gets him booted from the show. Shenanigans. ...

Our little Craigslist is growing up! Craigslist went from around 200 to roughly 300 sites this last week with the addition of 97 new and exciting Craigslist locations. While a cynic might view this expansion as a way to get a foothold in other places before competition from Google and Microsoft comes stopping in, we think that it has more to do with people clamoring for these locations. Of all the new cities out......

There was no sophomore slump for the Whiskeytown setting this past Saturday in the 19th annual Lemurian Shasta Classic. In fact, enhanced by temperatures in the eighties, this year's Lemurian, was absolute, total brutality -- just as nature and race director Ron Bresolin Jr. intended.

Which was perfect, because that's exactly what more than 300 tough-ass mountain bike muthas from Oregon to Santa Barbara came to the banks of Brandy Creek to experience.

2005 Long Course winner Tim Olson of Chico put on another clinic, setting a course record of 2:12:21 en route to his second consecutive Lemurian win. On the Sport Course, Chris Coble of Concord also set a new standard, tearing it up in an impressive 2:01:11. Former World Champion Linda Eckhart of Auburn was the first woman finisher on the Long Course, putting up a 3:04:22 on a single speed.

For the rest of the competitors, it wasn't so easy. Across the board, times were about five minutes slower than last year even though the course was actually drier and more manageable. Blame it on the heat.

The Coast Guard is searching for a 22-year-old UC Santa Barbara student who was last seen on Wednesday morning with a friend, hanging out at the Sutro Baths on Ocean Beach. Shawn Attaie had been out all night drinking with a childhood friend and that morning, they reportedly snuck into a restricted area on the beach, where Attaie fell into the water. The police are still piecing together the story, but they know Attaie must have fallen in some time after 11 a.m., because his friend has a digital photo of Attaie from around that time. After Attaie fell in, the friend apparently tried to get help from other tourists, but the tourists thought he was drunk or lying and pushed him away. At that point, the friend became "uncommunicative," and went home, where his roommates managed to figure out what happened. The friend is on a suicide watch, and Attaie's family say the two men were close and they wouldn't suspect foul play. For some reason, no one notified the Coast Guard or the federal Park Police (who have jurisdiction over Sutro Baths because it's part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area) until late Thursday night -- when Attaie's father called the Coast Guard to request an update on the search and independent searchers called to report finding nothing -- only to find that that was the first they'd heard of it. Apparently everyone thought someone else had called the police. Because it was so late, the Coast Guard and the Park Police couldn't start their search until this morning. They've searched all day but found nothing. They estimate that a person could spend maybe 10 hours in the water maximum. Attaie's family and friends are hoping maybe he got himself out of the water and they just haven't managed to hook up with him yet. ...

We are titled Gastronomique, and have to once in a while live up to the quiet sophistication of haute cuisine. So we went to the Fancy Food Show with great expectations. These were quickly dashed as we realized the Fancy Food emporium happened to be the convention floor of the Moscone center: it is as refined as plucking hair out of your nose. To make things worse, our plan to use a baby stroller......

Welcome, children, to a very special Halloween episode of the Trimethyldioxypurist. We have an update, an experiment, and a couple reviews of some coffee beans....

I'm sure all of you remember Lucky, the buny who was thrown into a lake with a lit firecracker attached to her. We're happy to say that she has finally found a safe home in Concord with an experienced rabbit caretaker. We are very happy for her and wish her the best....