Okay, we're not exactly sure how this works, but it's...bizarre. Seems that a trio of scammers are preying upon the elderly Chinese American community in SF (no, not Ed Jew). What's interesting is their technique. See, a woman and two men approach their victim, telling them that they look sick. One of the suspects then "fills a teacup with water and invites the victim to stick a finger in the cup, explaining that it......

Update: Oh damn! The video's not working. It's a compilation of all the various calls we've gotten. We'll try re-uploading it when we get home from work. If you're like everyone else on the planet, you've been getting endless recorded calls about carpet cleaning. "Hi, this is Allison, blah blah blah, press 8 to schedule a carpet cleaning," the recording goes, or it's "Dave" with the same spiel. Sometimes it's "account services" calling about......

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

-- The very attractive Yusuf Bey IV, Your Black Muslim Bakery chief and sudden media darling, now faces real-estate scam charges. Gulp again, dude. [Chron] -- Blue Angels still allowed to soar; Daly still fights to ground them. [Examiner] -- VMware shares also soar. [Chron] -- Giants' Russ Ortiz and something called the youth movement. Hmm. [BeyondChron] -- Stop attacking SF meter maids, folks. [NPR] -- SF surveillance cameras suuuuuck. [ABC 7, via AP]......

Here's todays sports news...

Here's todays stories from SFist...

Last week's winner, the SF Weekly: Those of you longing for less Newsom news, the Weekly is your place! It's an entirely Ruby Tourk-free issue (except for the first two paragraphs of Matt Smith, at which point he then changes the subject entirely to talk some more about the city golf courses). More letters about Jade-Blue Eclipse. Has Nancy Pelosi had a facelift? People upset about the increase in fees for a state medical marijuana......

As fall settles in and another calendar page gets turned, thoughts turn from bbq's and vacations to holidays and the realization that '06 is coming to an end. With all that going on, with change in the air, we wonder what is it that made that makes the -ists ponder? ...

If it weren't for our life as an -ist, we're not sure we'd ever leave our apartment. Fortunately, to fully -ist, one must seek out the new, the fresh, and the unknown. Brand new, or just new to us, that's what we're all about this week. Phillyist keeps it fresh by getting a new motto, learning to prioritize, and taking in an experimental indie rock show. Torontoist does their first post in franglais, gets ready......

You'd think that after our ungrateful sniping about the way we were (without our knowledge) nominated for a "Pubby" award, that the San Francisco Bay Area Publicity Club would blacklist us from all future events. However, it was not to be, as we just recieved notification that we were nominated again this year! (This is the part where we'd link to the award information on the BAPC site, but they barely mention it as of......

Thanks to the voting efforts of our wonderful readers, SFist's Editors will be going to the San Francisco Bay Guardian Best of the Bay party at Club Six this Wednesday. We have to go through this curiously arcane RSVP process (no simple Evite for the Guardian!) to go to an earlier part of the shindig for "The Winners" (the real people start arriving at 9, you should totally go). We got a nice acknowledgement that......

Reader Nick quite intelligently sent his feedback to Muni, and even more cleverly sent his experiences to us. Here's hoping he gets a response from Muni on his concerns -- Nick, keep us posted! On Tuesday, I was waiting for a bus to take me from 4th and Market to 4th and King. A 30 came by and I got in line and waited for everyone to get off so I could board. While......

We must admit we're kind of fascinated, in the bad way, by people who steal babies and pretend the babies are theirs. It intrigues the same part of our brain that reads stories about cat hoarders. This probably says something very bad about us, doesn't it? (On the bright side, none of our friends will ever ask us to baby-or cat-sit for them ever again.) In San Jose, a 3-month-old baby from Reno has been......

So are the people behind the J.T. Leroy hoax all irritated that James Frey has gotten the bulk of the publicity -- and subsequent sales boost -- in the "Authors who misrepresent themselves to the public" press beat? Is that why Geoffrey Knoop is now giving interviews in which he admits that (former) partner Laura Albert was the one who created J.T. Leroy, wrote under that name, and duped all sorts of literati? We......

Hey, what's with the new cool SFist banner and block ads you can see all over the -ist network? Well, after an intense, breakneck reader contest, we had our winner, with Rachael Sbuttoni's Muni-themed ads winning by a landslide. Aren't they cool? So meet SFist's newest best friend, our own Southern Belle transplanted to the foggy streets of our city. Everyone say "hey" to Rachael! Introduce yourself in one sentence: A slice of the......

Bay Area crime roundup...