Surely looking to turn us all into latter-career, Catalina-vacationing Natalie Woods, it looks like the rain will fall down (and wake our dreams) and won't stop until god knows when. Flooding, high winds, high tides, airport delays, glacial weather, and mass hysteria are all expected to bring us some mid-winter cheer. Santa Cruz will be getting the brunt of it, or so says the radar, so grab your spot at Pergolesi early and hold......

Serialized gem / siren song Tales of the City drew many folks to SF. Well, it brought us here, anyway. And the character of Mary Ann Singleton acted as a temporary stand-in until many of us arrived. To wit: Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time. She came to the city alone for an eight-day vacation. On the fifth night, she drank three Irish coffees......

We're not sure if we should be scared or skeptical here, folks -- first, the alleged terror cell in Lodi (terror cell! Terror! But the administration's record? Skeptical!) and now, Amtrak service and the Richmond-SF BART line have been shut down. So a man of Middle Eastern descent got on the Amtrak this morning in Sacto, going to Martinez. When he missed his stop, the conductor came by at the Richmond stop to let him know, and found him disoriented, distracted, and chanting in a foreign language. He became angry, identified himself as a Muslim and said, "The train is going to fall into the sea, the train is going to go away." The conductors did a search of the train and found four mysterious packages, one by the angry man's seat. The man was taken away by the Richmond PD, and the Walnut Creek bomb squad is "assessing its options" with the packages. Amtrak found that the man had another ticket going all the way to So Cal. So -- scared or skeptical? We're just going to rock back and forth in a liberal-who's-been-mugged dither of self-doubt now, thanks for asking. Picture of the Richmond Amtrak station from The Bus Stops Here...