The Library Tower (AKA the U.S. Bank Tower) in Los Angeles could soon be the second tallest building west of the Mississippi thanks to San Francisco's proposed Transbay Terminal. While the Library Tower, located in downtown Los Angeles, stands at an alluring 1,018-feet tall, the Transbay Terminal is primed to win the measuring contest at 1,200-feet. You know, we're just saying. Not to brag or anything. Anyway, our tallest skyscrapers so far are as......

Although last week's test on the American tap water by chemists claims to have detected the sex hormone estradiol -- found such vertebrate animals as birds, reptiles, and fish -- a more recent test conducted by the American Waterworks Association Research Foundation, says that San Francisco's "best tasting" H20 has come up sparkling clean. The Gate reports that our tap water, which is really quite tasty compared to, say, the waters of Southern California......

Back in high school, we had an English teacher who really drilled the Transcendentalists into our brains, especially that one Thoreau Emerson quote: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." What can we say? It still makes us think. Like about restaurants that have hardly changed in at least 20 years (the amount we can vouch for, since that's when we moved here from Southern California) if not 35 -- Juan's Place, in Berkeley. We......

But some good news: The LA Times has a helpful breakdown worth a moment of your time, on how you can help people (and pets!) in need right now. We've re-printed it for your convenience: ...

Whales are fascinating creatures, so: alas. This weekend a baby humpback whale washed up on the shore in Pacifica. The Marine Mammal Center gave word of the decomposed 27-foot female body, and said "experts" will test the whale's flesh to find out the cause of her death. Earlier this year, blue whales (the largest of us all) washed up on the shores of Southern California, but the Center says that this humpback discovery/death is......

We used to think we couldn't stand Sean Penn, but he never really did anything to deserve our ire. He's talented; seems to have similar political to ours; married to her, wonderful her; surfs; from Southern California; lives in the Bay Area; and above all else, is attractive. Then we figured it out: we didn't hate Sean Penn, we feared him. He seems like the kind of guy who could and would kick our......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

We mentioned a few weeks ago that the funding for California's oft-proposed bullet train system is suspect. Things are looking up in a way, as the High Speed Rail Authority approved the project's first phase. However, the Fresno Bee recently reported another wrinkle: Since the management for San Diego, the Southern California Association of Governments, is pushing for "magnetic levitation trains," rather than steel-wheeled ones, that city may get left on the boarding platform. ...

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly....

So the final pre-bowl Bowl Championship Series (BCS) poll is out, and guess what? Everybody's pissed about something, except for Ohio State and Florida, the two teams that received Golden Tickets to the big game. Different year, same BS for the BCS.

Hey, did you know today is Mayor Gavin Christopher Newsom Day in Manila? And we're celebrating by running another installment of our column: Who's Attacking Newsom Now! We ordinarily run this column along with its sister column, Who's Defending Newsom Now!, but -- well, it's looking kind of bleak on the Defending side this week, except for the spiffy Gavin Newsom 2008 thong to your right. We think that's for president, since the mayoral election......

The massive gap between rental rates and mortgage rates in the Bay Area is often cited as one of the reasons the entire real estate market's headed for certain doom. Having sunk some money into said market, we're very interested in exactly what's going to go on with housing prices and rental rates, so we read the real estate press as carefully as a haruspex examines sheep guts.

So we had to go put our tale of "San Francisco Secret Service" callback woe up on Scott Stereogum's post requesting stories of calling the numbers in Paris Hilton's hacked Sidekick. While there, we noted that her friend "Nessie Traina," AKA Vanessa Traina, daughter of local romance novelist Danielle Steele, was also listed. She was last spotted at Fashion Week in New York. Of course, the number is a 310 number, which means she's......

Northern California and Southern California are locked in battle. It's not over the quality of coffee, the issue of transportation, of taxes or water or real estate or celebrity sightings. It's a battle for the freedom of information and the tools used to distribute that information. Case in point is SB 96, introduced by former entertainment industry critic turned patsy Kevin Murray, Democratic state Senator from Los Angeles County. Murray has taken on the cause......

On Sunday the 17th at 5:04 p.m., it'll be the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. ...

Yesterday the Democratic Caucus of the California State Senate voted to replace termed-out senator John Burton [D-San Francisco] with Don Perata [D-Oakland] as the new President Pro-tempore of the senate. Considered the 'second most powerful' political position in Sacramento, Bay Area lawmakers breathed a sigh of relief - an appointment of his rival for the post, Martha Escutia of Whittier, would have signaled a complete shift in power to Southern California (sorry, LAist). Perata is a former teacher in Oakland's public schools, having earned his credentials at the University of California, Berkeley. Generally considered left-of-center even within the California Democratic Party, he has fought for gun regulation, improved funding for public schools and even has a pet-project website, OaklandSchools.com, set up for students, teachers and parents to report problems and lobby legislators on behalf of their beleaguered school district. He's currently working to oppose the huge new casino in nearby San Pablo. This appointment comes on the heels of allegations, investigated by the Chron, of improprieties during his campaign related to business relationships with his son, Nick Perata, and local businessman and college friend Timothy G. Staples. It's also interesting to note that Perata was Burton's pick, and coincides with a number of political moves that Burton has made as his stint in the State Senate draws to a close. EssEffist would like to point out that they don't call it the "Brown-Burton Machine" for nothing....

Now that the West Nile virus has been found in dead birds in San Mateo County and Santa Clara, officials are bracing themselves for the first human infections in the Northern California region....