Goodbye, Ed Jew's attorney Steven Gruel! The revolving door that is beleaguered former District 4 Supervisor Ed Jew's legal team spins once again, depositing the pugnacious Mr. Gruel on the street and leaving the team's latest addition Stuart Hanlon (hired to replace Bill Fazio in the state criminal case) in charge of all of Ed's legal matters. Gruel, as you may recall, was handling Ed's case on the city ethics charges and the federal racketeering......

-- Smell that? It's the stench of awards season underway. And the San Francisco Film Critics Circle nominees are... [Hartlaub, Maximum Strength Mick] -- Rincon Hill? Is fit to be tied. [Curbed] -- The Hayward fault is coming to get you, us. [The Snitch] -- Mark and Carole and Tim and SFist. [SFBG] -- "[C]od sperm crostini." (Also: barf.) [Eater] -- Will you buy us this incredibly well lit house? [The Front Steps] --......

Oh man, are you kidding? This is terrible. Not to get all tugging-the-heart strings today, but this spill is much worse than initially reported yesterday. This oil covered bird above was found at Fort Baker cove in Sausalito today. It seems that the Marin Headlands are getting crazy sloshed with oil on their shores. (The aerial shots of the spill on SFGate are jaw-dropping.) A Golden Gate National Recreation Area ranger claims that the......

UNKLE's James Lavelle sure would like to show you his elbow. Maybe you'll get the chance to see it live? Downtempo, trip hop duo from England, UNKLE, has been a popular outfit on the dance floor for years. Now, for the first time ever, UNKLE will make its appearance as a live band. Using guitars, bass, drums and synths set against a backdrop of lights and LED screens for a unique audiovisual experience -- do......

Yum! Did you smell something nasty in downtown SF yesterday? Some people described it like raw sewage, and others like rotting meat. Turns out it was from the sewage holding system, which was ripening in the sun faster than it was getting flushed into the system. Apparently we have a system where waste gets shunted into holding boxes located throughout the city, which periodically get flushed out with water -- but not periodically enough......

We found this photo in our inbox this morning. It may (or may not) be Condoleezza Rice. She's been in town for Bill Walsh's memorial service. As George tells us, after he snapped the shot at about 10:30 a.m. yesterday morning, "you could definitely smell the evil sycophant as she passed." Oh dear. Does that mean that she doesn't bathe properly? We hope not. The shoes and bag we can imagine her sporting, but......

Your Black Muslim Bakery update: the business is being liquidated in an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding (they have almost $1 million in debt) after a number of unnamed potential buyers dropped out, and the 19-year-old arrested for shooting journalist Chauncey Bailey now says (video clip) he was beaten and coerced into a false confession to the murder. The Oakland PD homicide officer assigned to the case says that's false and they have a taped confession where......

-- Power outages enrage your editor, city dwellers. [Chron, KGO] -- Bang, bang: SF Supes okay with handguns. [KPIX] -- Aging journalism fetishist and noted lover of the way old books smell, Frances Dinkelspiel, misguidedly and "ethereally" derides the Chronicle's hiring of former SFist editor Eve Batey. [GhostWorldWord] -- Top-drawer Harvard fisticuffs, darling: Facebook sued by its old college chums. [Chron] -- Trash talk to resume Wednesday morning. Grrrrul, please. [KRON 4] -- Great......

The SFPD arrested the guy who murdered the anti-crime activist in the Haight, Joe Konopka, in an S&M session gone wrong. They believe Konopka, who was found handcuffed, choked to death on plastic covering his face. After Konopka died, the murderer took his laptop, jewelry, and cell phone before fleeing the scene. Does anyone know what happened at 16th and South Van Ness Wednesday night? We walked by there around 9 p.m. and there were......

Campus tree residency news! At Cal, it turns out those people living in the trees to protest the UC's plan to cut them down themselves did significant damage to the trees in question by cutting off the tops of the trees to put in their sleeping platforms. Ah, the sweet smell of irony. Meanwhile, at rival Stanford, they've finally evicted a veteran who's been living in the tree grove off Palm Drive for almost 10......

We gobble the various food sections up each Wednesday. Here are our favorite nibbles from today's offerings. SF Chronicle: Sun-heated ovens are examined. Good: thought to help save the planet, low(ish) cost, uses "green" technology, and works in sunny/warm climes. Iffy/Bad: requires rooftop or outdoor space that City apartment dwellers probably lack, won't work on foggy or rainy days, lacks precision of traditional ovens, and can take a loooooong time. Saturday is Bastille Day, oui,......

Photo of Union Street repaving...

Get that gigantic backpack and sleeping bag and trek on over to Cody's Books on Fourth Street, as Tony and Maureen Wheeler, the founders of Lonely Planet, read from their new books, Unlikely Destinations (the story of Lonely Planet) and Bad Lands (Tony's trips to dangerous countries). If you can't make tonight's reading (7 p.m.), they're in town through Friday, reading at Get Lost in SF tomorrow night and Book Passage in Corte Madera on......

Gavin "Big G" Newsom and Kamala "Lil' Kam" Harris laying down some tracks in the studio. We smell a Grammy, or at least something for them to fall back on if things don't go their way this November. ...

Pee-yoo. Workers fixing the pipes on Valencia Street near Tiffany Avenue (behind St. Luke's) opened a 100-year-old unused cast-iron pipe in the ground, which released what Bay City News is delicately referring to as "a noxious odor." The odor was sufficiently noxious that 30-some people in the area got sick (nausea, dizziness, vomiting) and around 11-13 people went inside to St. Luke's to get treated. Ironically, the rest of the workers at St. Luke's were......

You may be shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn that sometimes, some of the people who come to the Castro for Halloween are not entirely well-behaved. Fortunately, after last year's shootings and stabbings, Bevan promised to plan ahead to make 2007 safer. And he did! After some reminding by the BAR, which ran an article last week about how he totally forgot to do that planning he'd been talking about. Now it looks like......

Here's a rundown of what's happening in the world of sports blogs...

We're getting so upset to have to keep writing the same post over and over again -- yet another San Francisco independent bookstore is shutting its doors. This time, it's the not-so-long-ago opened Cody's SF, next to the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, who made it about a year and a half before the news today. Is that retail space cursed or what? The store's last day will be April 20, but the Cody's......

So we all know Muni is having some budget problems, mainly that in order to work the way they (and us) want it to work, they'll need more money, like $150 million dollars. But they also know that any sort of fare increase will only bring the wrath of God on them. What to do, what to do? ...

A mortuary in Rohnert Park got a restraining order filed against them when it was discovered that they kept decaying bodies on their premises. The authorities were tipped off to the problem when people in the businesses next to the mortuary realized that the awful smell that was coming from next door was decaying bodies and not the KFC/Taco Bell also in the strip mall. So the city sent a couple of inspectors in to check out the sprinkler system and before you could say "abra cadevar," discovered two decaying bodies by a swamp cooler and two others in a garage area. Lest you think the mortuary, that being Abby Chapel of the Redwoods Mortuary, did nothing to prevent the bodies from decaying, the two by the swamp cooler were covered in baby powder. ...

Bay Area Wanderer: Market and Church, San Francisco...

If SFist were to have a dream job, it would be in one of those think tanks that puts together all those studies that are so amazingly obvious that even six year old children could figure out as true. Like all those studies saying that people talk a lot about the Super Bowl. Or that people spend way too much time on the Internet at work. Today, we get news on two studies of similar dimension....

Remember that day when there was a weird smell in New York and all those dead birds in Austin? Feel left out? Wish we could go have some sort of gaseous anamoly? Well, we had one today as a gas leak in the Inner Richmond caused the evacuation of residents and students in a local middle school. ...

There's sort of a weird story of NIMBYism going on in Berkeley and that is that a shelter is being kicked out of Solano Avenue due to the usual reasons-- noise, smell, and dirty streets-- except in this case, the shelter is for pets. The place that's being kicked out is the nonprofit Milo Foundation and their sin is of barking animals, excessive dog shit, and the smell of piss wafting through the air. In other words, their being kicked out for being a little too much like Duboce Park....

We don't know about you, but it's friggin cold out there. Well, not for some of you. It seems as though places that are supposed to be cold are warm and places that are supposed to be warm are cold. Or maybe that's just us. Either way, we're freezing. Austinist said goodbye to their co-editor (sell-out) and played rumor monger ">on the SXSW lineup. And when dozens of dead birds littered downtown Austin, it's......

Speed kills. It's an old football saw, but it still cuts right to the heart of the matter in sorting out the detritus of last night's BCS National Championship Game: faster is better.

So there's a big, somewhat juicy story buried in Matier & Ross' column today about the Mayor. Now first off, it's kind of interesting that they have the story second and lead with a not terribly interesting story about how much the Governator's broken leg costs. But whatever-- we don't mean to mean to get all-conspiratorial about the story. Anyways, what the story is about is that on the night Officer Bryan Tuvera was shot, the Gav was at a holiday party and when he showed up at the hospital, he was a little un-sober....

Now that we were back, we were looking forward to waiting for MUNI and smelling all the chocolate-y goodness of the new aromatic "Got Milk?" ads (insert Got MUNI? joke here). But alas, we came back a day late and a dollar short. Due to the usual stuff, the chocolate-smelling bus stops are no more. Meet the new MUNI bus stop, same as the old MUNI bus stop. ...

Busses of all sorts have us in a tizzy these days. Got Milk? With our MUNI wait? That seems so 1993 and wrong! When we think of the smells of baked cookies, we feel a combo of anticipation, hunger, happiness, and youthful delight. Of course, that's assuming the doughy, chocolatey smells come from a real kitchen (preferably our own) and are not competing with cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, urine, barf, or rancid food....

We're back again! Only for today, though. Your fearless editor SFist Jon returns later this morning. --Brr. It's cold in here. There must be some Toros in the atmosphere. --Federal judge stops the new owner of the Mercury News from working with the Chron to consolidate local media coverage. --Yahoo defeats Google. --Ed Jew gets sworn in as the District 4 supervisor next week -- Fiona Ma stepped down early. --Is this for real?? They're......