Results tagged “theman”

We headed back to the Roxie this week for a little sci-fi at the Indiefest Another Hole in the Head festival, courtesy of director Richard Schenkman and writer Jerome Bixby, who’s known also for the Twilight Zone and Star Trek.

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week.

Now that Netroots have slowed down on the Tauscher hating, they've moved onto another subject to which their ire is drawn, KSFO. One of the diarists on Daily Kos is telling the story of poor Spocko the Blogger. Spocko had a thing about KSFO for whatever reason and decided to record bits and pieces of various shows with the hopes of capturing of something truly appallingly in bad taste and full of invective. Our guess is that he probably spent a good ten minutes or so before he had enough damning evidence. With recorded bits and pieces of the shows. Spocko the Blogger turned some of the quotes into mp3s and sent them to various sponsors of KSFO shows as well as their corporate overlords. The obvious reason, of course, is to show those holding the purse strings just what they are spending money on.

After a day off, the 2006 Tour de France is heading into its second week today, unbeknownst to most Americans. According to the Chronicle, only 280,000 Americans watch the Tour on TV. Compare that to 91 million for the Super Bowl and 17 million for the World Series.

Americans aren't interested in international sports, mostly because we don't win them. The entire run of this year's soccer World Cup has garnered only nine million viewers nationwide -- the American Idol finale had 36 million viewers, on one night. Unless the USA is kicking ass as a country, such as in the Olympics -- and often not even then, Americans care little for televised coverage of international competition in sports like soccer, track and field, and cycling.

The Tour de France is worth watching though. It is the biggest event in the sport of cycling and really highlights the sporting differences between Americans and the rest of the world. And it's very accessible. Outdoor Life Network (OLN) provides daily repeat coverage of every single stage, including extended, live pedal-by-pedal from two of the best to ever call a race: Phil Leggett and Paul Sherwin.

This year, fate and The Man haven't made it any easier for the ADD-addled American television audience to watch skinny foreign guys in lycra riding bikes for hours and hours, day after day. After an opening week dominated more by who wasn't racing than by who was, the Tour suddenly went from a peloton of favorites to a small breakaway of "other guys."

Maillot jeune graphic from Team CSC website.

The fallout from Apple's Boot Camp continues, and we in the labs are struggling to keep up.

We love men. A lot. All of them. Well, maybe not Scott McClellan, or that guy who dumped us in the seventh grade, come to think of it, but most. So when we heard there was a show at the Lab about our favorite subject, we knew we had to get there and see what all the fuss was about.

While we’ve been stuck inside our stuffy apartment in the Tenderloin, nursing a nasty cough amid empty tissue boxes and cartons of Chunky Monkey (hey, we have a sore throat), we’ve started to feel a touch of the cabin fever. Despite our frail and sickly condition, we’re determined to get a little fresh air and check out the following shows starting tonight. We hope to see you there, just don’t stand too close.

If there's one thing we love more than passing along days-old links to non-stories, it's laughing and pointing at people on the internets getting all riled up at perceived assaults on their freedom of expression.

It's that time of the year. The 2006 NCAA men's basketball championship tournament starts this morning at 9:20 A.M. PST, ushering in nearly a solid month of the best that college basketball has to offer. Sixty-four teams from around the country, from conferences of different sizes and configurations, wade into the dizzying fray of sporting unpredictability that has come to be known as March Madness.

Hey sports fans, in case you missed Sunday's episode of "Q&A" on C-SPAN--and judging by the ratings we're guessing that most of you did--host Brian Lamb interviewed the founder, President, and primary funder of Democracy Matters, a nonprofit foundation that focuses on grass-roots, pro-democracy reforms.

Here in the labs, we're not above passing along a bit of Corporate Advertising as if it were genuine tech news. So we'll tell you that Apple is running a Billion Songs Countdown promotion for its iTunes Music Store. Every 100,000th song downloaded gets a free iPod nano and a gift certificate, and the recipient of the billionth download gets an iMac, a $10,000 gift certificate to the iTMS, and ten (10) 60GB iPods. (If you don't feel like giving your money to The Man, there's a free entry form).

In our ongoing efforts to Stick It To The Man, we threw off the shackles of local cable giants and went with Alameda Power & Telecom for all of our cable service needs. One of the pleasant side effects has been getting public access channel 31, which produces the TV show "Monster Island Theatre."

SFisters Jackson and Matt already posted about Yahoo's purchase of del.icio.us and Google's new transit trip planner. While we don't like to openly criticize other contributors on the site, we in the labs couldn't help but notice that they were a little light on the tenuous connections, vague observations, and jumping to unfounded conclusions. We hope to correct that here.

Our concert picks for the week of 7/21-7/27.

Hey, remember the kids rampaging through the streets of the Mission, smashing the state one window at a time? Well, it ain't quite over yet. First off, at least one protestor who's still in custody needs help coming up with the $5,000 needed to post bail -- you can send a donation! Us, we would call Bad Boy Bail Bonds (they speak our language -- funky-fresh rappin').

Well, it starts off with a castration and only gets better from there.

If this review were an Edgar G. Ulmer movie, it would be covered in fog, have a sweeping orchestral score (public domain of course), and SFist would be a nihilistic outsider desperate for acceptance.

So apparently the San Francisco school board held some public meetings to decide on the start of the new school year. Before Labor Day? After Labor Day? Decisions, decisions, decisions. Everyone was pretty much in agreeance agreement agreeance over starting school the week before Labor Day until several parents raised their objections. Turns out it would interfere with the start of Burning Man and well, the parents didn’t want readin’, ritin’ and rithmetic to get in the way of little Timmy and little Susie missing out on mud baths, raves, and art installations. While not official, the School Board is probably going to go with the pre-Labor Day opening.

Andrew Krucoff, who used to be Mr. Intervista at Gothamist, apparently has a fetish for Berkeley punk. Hence he's gone and provided the innerweb with free downloads of this sweet compilation tape [Thanks, BoingBoing].

We know, you've got a lot of pulls on your time these days, what with company holiday parties and SFist's first Bay Blotto tonight, but you really should know about a couple of very badass things happening on stage right now:

Every Labor Day tens of thousands of geeks, nerds, hippies, frat boys and all other sorts of disaffected rejects pile into vehicles and make a pilgrammage to one of the most inhospitable places known to man - the Playa of Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, Nevada. Why do they go? To create art, perform, party, get naked and otherwise cast off the everyday repressions of society. And to burn stuff. That's right, it's less than a week until people start arriving for the annual arts festival Burning Man. Started in 1986 by Larry Harvey and Jerry James as just another bonfire - though with a more artistic bent - on Baker Beach in San Francisco, it was moved out to the desert when the SFFD shut down the immolation of their large wooden structure in 1990. Rumor has it that some libertarian gun enthusiasts from the local branch of the Cacophony Society suggested Black Rock Desert, long a popular spot for shootists looking for somewhere big and flat to fire of their weapons. So on Labor Day 1990, people packed up their trucks and headed to Nevada. Now in it's 15th year in the desert, Burning Man has become an international symbol for disaffection from modern life. No money is allowed to change hands - the economy of Black Rock City, pop. 30k+, is entirely based on bartered goods and services. Michael Krasny of KQED-FM's Forum interviewed Larry Harvey and Brian Doherty, author of "This is Burning Man" this morning at ten. For more information, including history, tickets and tips on surviving in the desert, check out the official Burning Man website.