Old hippy dude throwing down with a yuppy at a Michael Pollan talk. In Palo Alto! A small skirmish errupted when the bolo tie wearing hippy was upset by the yuppy not volunteering a saved seat (turns out was saving it for his mom) for an elderly gentleman. Things got good when sunglasses were grabbed, and Stanford students intervened. Isn’t eating well supposed to make you less angry? Oh, and the talk was really......

This year's Stanford commencement speaker? Oprah Winfrey. [SJ Merc]The Spots goes eHarmony-ish on us. [Spots]Milk screenplay writer Dustin Lance Black looks ten-years-old. We mean that as a compliment. [BAR]A street lamp dies, another night is over, the big cat exhibit reopens... [SFGate]With the return of Tyra's mildly-retarded ass comes Potes totally brilliant ANTM recaps. [TWOP]Meow: Harvey Milk Club prez Rafael Mandelman goes after Leno, Newsom. [BeyondChron]......

Forget starlets canoodling in the Marina. Ron Howard appeared at Stanford this week to screen Frost/Nixon. Coincidentally on the same day another famous redhead spoke there as well. Students had a chance to weigh in on the ending a bit, so if you hate the results, blame them.......

Police believe that a Santa Rosa man, who recently stabbed himself with a homemade spear just seconds before the fuzz burst through his front door early Sunday morning, is possibly connected to last Thursday's carjacking and rape incident involving a 29-year-old mother. According to the Gate, "Aristotle Quadra, 30, faces charges of carjacking, kidnapping, sexual assault and attempted murder. He is being held at a Santa Rosa hospital while being treated for self-inflicted stab......

San Francisco's musical offerings were bountiful Wednesday night ranging from Film School to Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings to The Thermals. It seems, though, that most of you made the correct choice: Vampire Weekend. Now we don't doubt that the other shows weren't amazing -- we were pretty miffed that there were so many choices on one night -- but clearly if you are anybody then you were wearing a blue pin-striped shirt, dark......

Saturday is what is known around these here parts as "the Big Game," a kinda cute nickname for a game usually not of any importance to anyone other to us NorCal folks. This game, in particular, doesn't have much going for it as Stanford, with the exception of the 'SC upset, hasn't been very good and Cal has been more disappointing than Fred Thompson's candidacy. Nevertheless, the game is always pretty exciting and full of tradition-- all the things that makes college football what it is. ...

By Frances Reade Eugene Robinson has been the leader of S.F.'s most dangerous art-rock band Oxbow since 1989. We don’t mean Oxbow is "dangerous" as in "Tipper-Gore-no-likey." We mean "dangerous" like “Eugene is known to lurch into the crowd mid-set and strangle irritating audience members into unconsciousness." "Dangerous" as in "the man strips down and brandishes his pee-pee in a threatening manner onstage." "Dangerous” as in… "awesome." Besides slinging 18 years of sweet, sludgy......

Update: Now with "correct" spelling! We understand that it's common for coaches to put their game plans (strategy notes? football-y documents?) in their pants. What is strange is Standford using the following shot of Coach Jim Harbaugh, with his plans tucked neatly near his crotchal area, as their marketing tool of choice on 2007 football publicity handouts, wallet-sized calendars, and flyers. Behold: Looks a bit crude, which we like since it almost makes football interesting......

A dicsussion of the illegality of iPodding while driving or cycling...

At Pine and Divisadero on Wednesday afternoon, a man severely slashed a woman with a box cutter (some reports we saw said she might die, while others said the wounds were not life-threatening); the cops subsequently caught him. A police officer in Oakland shot a man to death yesterday afternoon at 54th and MLK, where a number of shootings have occurred recently. The officer confronted the man for reasons that they declined to specify to......

Remember the Jamba Juice hepatitis A scare? And remember how we said there were gymnasts competing in a national meet in San Jose a few weeks ago? Well -- you guessed it -- it turns out the gymnasts might have been exposed to the virus. The hepatitis A carrier made smoothies for the gymnasts during the meet and in the trade shows outside. She claims she used good hygiene and food safety practices throughout (wearing......

We've got some follow-up news on Blotter items covered previously! In response to allegations by deceased Stanford engineering grad student May Zhou's father earlier this week that his daughter's death was a homicide and not self-inflicted, the Santa Rosa police released additional information from their investigation. Namely, they said they have videotape and receipts of her buying four bottles of sleeping pills from local drugstores in two days, and they have an email she sent......

More blotter-type news today -- sorry they're kind of downers. First up, remember May Zhou, the Stanford graduate student who was found dead in her car trunk in Santa Rosa? Well, her father remains convinced it was not a suicide, and cites a private autopsy report he's commissioned that shows blunt force trauma injuries. The offical police report, by contrast, showed no trauma injuries but did indicate toxic levels of Benadryl in her system. Zhou's......

Hey, everyone loves a list, right? Especially those ranking institutions of higher learning. The yearly U.S. News & World Report list is out -- any wagers on how local schools did? And, really, how much would it affect your choices? We remember mulling the 1991 list saying "can't get in there, can't get in there, nope, not there either . . ." But it's still fun to see how stuff measures up, we suppose. Unshockingly, Stanford University was high on the list, reaching No. 4 this year, undoubtedly driving the next generation of Azia Kims....

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......

A public memorial is all set to honor Bill Walsh. It'll be held at Candlestick at 11 AM on August 10th and among the speakers will be Joe Montana and Eddie De Bartolo. A private ceremony will be held on August 9th at the Stanford Memorial Church. Speakers there will not only include Montana and DeBartolo, but NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Dianne Feinstein. Rumored to attend are Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of State George Shultz who were friends of the Genius. Current owners of the 49ers, John and Denise York have also asked that the Governor declare a Bill Walsh Day. ...

It has been documented, in Nature no less, that listening to Mozart makes you smarter. Only for spatial reasoning, though. Only for 15mn afterwards. And the results got disputed later. Damn. And even worst, the same effect was observed with music from, hold on one second while we regain our composure, Yanni. Yanni!...

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......

SF shootings: two shot, one dead, in the Bayview Monday afternoon (the resulting scene then blocked the T-Third for an hour), another shooting in Oceanview, and a man shot in a drive-by at 21st and Florida on Friday night. Dang! A huge fight on Durant Avenue by Telegraph in Berkeley Sunday night -- around 50 people were involved and they had to close off the area for an hour. A 14-year-old was sent to the......

The graduation ceremony at San Francisco State University was the biggest (and therefore the best?), we've ever seen. Some 3500-odd purple-clad Gators (Gaters?) lunged for their sheepskins a few weeks back. Wow, we attended a lot of graduation ceremonies the past month. Like SFSU, City College, and the Academy of Art in S.F. but also Stanford and Cal. Who spoke at your commencement? Anyway, get on out there, graduates, and rock and roll with your......

--At Intersection for the Arts, an evening of performances, readings, and conversations with formerly-incarcerated youth in The Prison Project, their year-long artistic exploration of the California penal system. $5-15, 7 p.m., 446 Valencia (x 15th). --At the Balboa, you've got a documentary about Hitler's theft of European art works in one theater, and Knocked Up in the other. 3630 Balboa (x 38th), $8.50 (unless it's your birthday, in which case it's free!). --Tonight at the......

After quitting his job at Oracle, Rajeev Samant moved back to India to grow wine. The India Times/Economic Times has the story on Samant's journey from Stanford student to Oracle employee to a winemaker. He started his winery, the likes of which has never been seen in his native country before (and, in fact, was illegal according to some state laws), back on his family's 30-acre plot in India. ...

The Chron's reporting that two people were stabbed outside the club Loft 11 on 11th and Folsom around 1:30 this morning. Apparently at the Loft 11 "Famous" Sunday night party, a fight broke out, spilled out into the street, and two men were stabbed. One has life-threatening injuries. The club shut down immediately after the stabbing occurred, and the police are looking for three male suspects wearing baseball caps backwards (which seems notable in......

--Are you into those Iowa Futures Market invisible-hand-of-the-marketplace economic-based ways of predicting political races? Usual Suspects has started one for the SF mayoral race. Gavin Newsom is pegged to win at $36.78. --The ACLU is going to sue a San Jose company for arranging those "rendition" flights for outsourcing torture. --Don Perata and his spendthrift ways win him a Golden Pig! --Midwifery in San Francisco suffers another blow. --Wow, the real estate market must......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

--It's the 100th anniversary of the Santa Cruz boardwalk! --They've more or less decided on the next school superintendent for San Francisco. He's going to face a possible strike by the teachers when he gets here. --Pictures of this weekend's bike messenger competitions. --The Unofficial Stanford blog has (unconfirmed) pictures of fake classmate Azia Kim. --Cafe Trieste denizens find housing for a mentally ill regular. --Is Gavin's blue tie back????? --Help a cat hit......

--They took away the hazmat license of the company whose truck blew up the Macarthur Maze. We can't really disagree with that. --Oh no! Puddles the hippo has died. He leaves his bereaved partner, Cuddles, and 16 children. --There's a lot of geek conventions in town this weekend. --And speaking of which, check out this Star Wars post office in Marin. --Two-alarm fire in the Richmond this afternoon. --The Gap's still having problems. --Condoleeza Rice......

We've written before about our love of soccer but unfortunately, being here in the States, it's a little hard to get the full flavor of it. Major League Soccer isn't quite that exciting and there's no longer a franchise here. There are also plenty of places in the city to watch some Premiere League (and occasional Serie A games) but it's not quite the same as watching the games in Europe. Also, we don't like to get up early. So we're kind of excited over the news that Stanford is going to host a game between the Premiere League's Chelsea and Mexico's Club America on July 14th....

The Stanford Daily swings into Day 2 of its wall-to-wall coverage coverage about Azia Kim, the fake Stanford student. This story is AWESOME. Today's article reveals that Azia Kim's friends from high school all thought she was going to one of those community colleges that feeds into Berkeley, but when she came back at Christmas break and said she'd gotten into Stanford, everyone believed her. While Kim's grades and extracurriculars weren't great, everyone figured she......

This story is awesome. Stanford University has caught a girl who's been pretending to be a student at the school for the last eight months. The girl, named Azia Kim, showed up on campus the day before freshman orientation this school year, and told two freshmen she was a freshman having temporary housing problems due to some kind of administrative snafu and that she didn't like the roommate she'd been assigned, and could she crash......