Even though he defected to Los Angeles, we were tickled when local fave Keith Knight took home a Harvey Award. Now another Bay Area sequential artist is up for a prestigious comics industry award. Melanie "Minty" Lewis was nominated for an Ignatz Award for her P.S. Comics #3, a book we bought at this years' Alternative Press Expo and totally loved....

The 20th Annual Harvey Awards (named for Harvey Kurtzman, genius cartoonist, founder of MAD Magazine, and lont-time Playboy contributor to boot) were announced this weekend at the Baltimore Comic Con. According to comics news site Newsarama, local cartoonist Keith Knight won in the panel strip category! ...

We're bummed we were out of town for all the ins and outs of Ed Jew's preliminary hearing -- but thanks to SFist Jer for covering it for us while we were gone! So today's latest? Ed Jew is going to stand trial. That is, Judge Harold Kahn found that the DA had enough evidence for the case to be presented to a jury, Next court date: August 20, presumably to set the trial date.......

Photo of costumed teens posing happily with their new books. These guys were great. They'd never heard of SFist before, so we skipped the questions about Ed Jew and recent shenanigans on the J-Church. We hate lines and we shy away from new things -- we're definitely a second- or third-generation adopter for tech, and a wait-for-the-paperback guy for books. But we guess this Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows turned things sideways. We......

Man, we were reading the Chron on the plane out of San Francisco on July 4 for vacation, balling our fists in frustration over missing the stories on Ed Jew's "part-time lover" response to the City Attorney's allegations AND the story about Aaron Peskin's zinger to Dianne Feinstein about her strange letter complaining about Chris Daly. No fair! (but thank you, SFist Jer, for covering it for us while we were gone!) Well, even......

We're all for technology that simplifies and informs, but sometimes we see a new service that sounds a little silly to us. eWine Match allows you to text message an ingredient or cuisine type to a very easy-to-remember number (411511); the service will respond with a few options that'd fit....

You know we love the Chronicle around here at SFist -- where else would we get breaking news updates, steal pictures, and follow the lives of the Gettys and Trainas? So we're still very much in shock about the news that they're going to be laying off 25% of their workforce. The reason given was that they can't make enough money in advertising and other sources to cover the cost of putting out the paper.......

One of the biggest food blog stories fired up this weekend. SFist Jer's analysis is a must read. The Sourdough Monkey Wrangler has inspirational info on making ginger ale and quiche (pictured at right). Beware of hazards in the home kitchen. Read more funny and a little sad safety tips courtesy of Muffin Top. Pasta night at What Did You Eat's house gets a little more ooomph when it's Swordfish with Orzo, pistachios and......

The Bay Area is home to many intriguing small businesses. Still, color us surprised that we've found in Juno Baby a local purveyor of high-quality children's educational products that manages to encapsulate what we like best in a company. ...

A few years back, we were flipping the channels, and we ended up on a program on PBS. We recognized Michael Tilson-Thomas and at first, we were thinking, hey, it’s our MTT, what is he up to? We stayed a while for the local angle, as we would have had we caught, say, the Warriors on ESPN, or Gavin on a Sunday morning political show, or SFist Jer on Check Please!. But then we......

Hey, did anyone go to the poets Eleven event at the new Mission Bay branch of the San Francisco Public Library? We love that we have a reason to hit the library besides picking up (or returning) our online reserves. SFist Jer decided to try out Runner's World magazine, thinking it would motivate him to run. While it was somewhat interesting to read a specialty exercise magazine, he's still more or less been stuck......

This past Wednesday we were treated to part one of the two-part Top Chef finale, which takes place in Las Vegas. While much of our interest in the show had to do with its local, er, location, we're far too invested to back out just because the final is on a bigger, gaudier stage. ...

While the name of this column is "SFist Reads", we have to ask: has anyone used the SFPL's online reserve system to reserve DVDs? We're just not as Netflixy as we used to be, and we're starting to wonder if the library might be a good substitute. Let us know your experiences in the comments! SFist Eve just finished Max Barry's novel Company, a brilliantly angry distillation of the workplace follies mocked by Dilbert......

Remember when we told you about the Northern California Book Awards? SFist reader Mark went, and blogged it. From his post you can see that it wasn't the event it could have been -- and, in fact, he emailed us a day later with http://liz-henry.blogspot.com/2006/04/lambda-lit-night.html">this link to Liz Henry's experiences at Lambda Lit night. In his words, "The contrast between the two events is, I think, instructive", and we're inclined to agree. As Mark......

Hey, folks, welcome back to another recap of the "slow food movement" of reality TV shows, Bravo's Top Chef. It's deliciously vibrant, diverse, and, most especially cool, local! Again, we're recapping last week's episode in hopes that y'all will check out the new episode tonight -- after all, if it gets decent ratings, it might get another season. Wouldn't it be swell to have a long-running series in our fair seven-by-seven?...

We finally paid off all our late fees accrued during an unfortunate incident invloving a badly overdue book under the passenger seat of our Civic. Now we're free to make online reserves again! Of course, our independent bookstore purchases have been picking up the slack -- but we're far more likely to reserve books we're not so sure about (like, say Everyone Worth Knowing) than to buy them. We're just frugal like that. SFist Jer......

This week we're two-timing (double teaming? Why does everything sound so dirty?) an online reserve and a book from one of our fine local independent bookstores. See our two picks after the jump, but first see what other, less fickle Fisters have on their nightstands: Wearing his Trimethyldioxypurist hat (and inspired by his recent conversation with the Shot's Greg Sherwin), SFist Jer is furthering his coffee education with Corby Kummer's excellent and informative The Joy......

We totally slacked over the holidays, and made not a dent in our checked-out online reserves. We did get some great books from our fine local independent bookstores for Christmas, but we must confess that we've barely cracked them open. Only one SFist seems to be reading these days... SFist Jer just finished Comfort Me With Apples by Ruth Reichl, who currently is the editor of Gourmet Magazine. The book chronicles Reichl's life from about......

We were flummoxed when our own SFist Jer posted about Little Star pizza (and simply titled it Good Pizza in the Western Addition. Good? That's it? We would have said 'great' or 'amazing' or 'zachary-esque.' But he beat us to it, so we have to settle for second best. That would be Patxi's, a Palo Alto institution which just bore an off-spring in the city. Patxi's, like Little Star before, is filling a big void in the SF culinary landscape: the equivalent of Zachary's, the unparalleled master of the deep dish pizza in the bay. ...

Oh man we're psyched about the holiday weekend, which begins for us in about 10 minutes! We have a few online reserves to pick up (can you believe that we haven't read the new Harry Potter yet?), and some recently purchased (from our fine local independent bookstores, of course) books beckon. How about you? Any plans to read over the holidays? Let us know in the comments! SFist Jer is back to reading his......

Between our online reserves and the review copies we happily receive, we've had such a book backup that we haven't made it out to any of our fine local independent bookstores over the past week. Listen to us whine about how busy we are with our free books! Well, soon you too will be able to share in the fun, as SFist will be giving away review copies of books, music, and movies from......

We're so excited about the new Mission Bay Library, which is set to open in 2006. Did you know that is will be the first new branch library in 40 years? While we're excited about any library news, this is great for us because this new library is very close to where we work, giving us an all-new place to pick up and drop off our online reserves. While we want to advocate book......

So often, when folks ask us what we're reading, we want to respond "The Internet". Seriously, we read online all damn day, it's amazing we are able to squeeze in words on paper, too! We can marry our love of the internet and books with the San Francisco Public Library's online reserve system, but it's also nice to get out there int he mix and thumb through the offerings at one of our fine......

This week, we were struck by how we related to each and every thing our fellow 'Fisters sent to us to compile for this column. While we won't go as far to give you the rundown on what we have on our online reserve list, or what we're looking forward to buying the next time we're in one of our fine local independent bookstores, we just can't restrain ourselves from self-indulgently chiming in on......

We've been reading up a storm this week, as several books we've been pining for on our However, our blissfully empty weekend is almost within reach, which means a trip to one of our online reserve list came through for us. What books are you eagerly awaiting, either from the library or to purchase at one of our fine local independent bookstores? Let us know in the comments. SFist Jer is reading John Barth's......

SFist welcomes all our new food column contributors to SFist reads. We, ourselves, have been known to check out cookbooks we reserved online from the SF Public Library, but we're way more likely to just buy them for keeps from one of our fine local independent bookstores. What makes you decide to buy a book, as opposed to checking it out from the library? Tell us in the comments! Before we get to the......