Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start: when Alex Smith got injured, there was some back-and-forth about whether or not he was healthy. While this was going on, Nolan made the occasional subtle and not-so-subtle dig at Smith for not being sufficiently tough. Cue speculation and rumormongering approaching Brangelina levels. The Merc apparently had heard some other Niners joining in on the Smith dog pile and asked Alex about it. Alex went a wee bit on the ballistic side and accused Nolan of trying to turn the team against him, making him play when he wasn't healthy, and for generally being a big poopy-head. This all hit the press sometime yesterday and, well, hello hullabaloo. Naturally, the two parties met and issued statements talking about how their relationship is all :) and not :( ...

Wow, almost everything we've posted today on SFist (except for SFist Tonight) is transportation-themed. Well, we're sorry to have to continue the trend with this news item: there's been a bad accident on 101 near Redwood City, involving a big rig that hit the center divide and burst into flames. What's going on with all these trucks combusting around here these days? One report said that the cab of the big rig exploded with the......

The Merc is reporting that starting today, Avis Rent A Car is offering Wi-Fi service with cars rented from its SFO location. At a mere $10.95 a day (which seems pricey, but we suppose is better than, say, renting by the hour at many cyber-cafes or whatnot), the enabling device can come with you into meetings, making this a pretty interesting option for the business traveller....

--Civic Center's SFMike reports on a Hayes Valley-themed mini-golf public art installation. That's the eponymous Mr. Hayes (not Rutherford B., but another guy named Thomas) to your right. --Gavin's now all pretending he meant for Theresa Sparks to get on the Police Commission after all. --The Merc News names its top five area Venture Capitalists under 40. --The KFOG KaBoom fest sounded like fun last night. --Pat Murphy shares his tips on keeping maggots out......

Today is, of course, Selection Sunday, the best day of the year for college basketball fans. But not necssarily so of Stanford fans as their chances of making it to the Tourney went down, down, down over the past couple of days. The Merc has a primer for today's fun. -Everbody loves the 49ers free agent moves. -Today's "the Warriors just might make the playoffs story" from the Merc. -Milton Bradley tries to preach the......

Public Relations. The very title is a euphemism for a trade that trades in euphemism. The 49ers experienced something of a Public Relations spasm earlier today....

Last night, we went to last night's Warriors/Cavs game, a game the Warriors lost in overtime. Now, we'll let Basketball Chris do the analysis and post-game wrap up, but we wanted to make an observation of our own. Mainly, that we went to see Lebron and we were disappointed. But not surprised. ...

And now, for the non-Warriors sports news of the day: -the leaking of Barry Bonds' amphetamines test might actually be a Catch-22 in that signing him will piss of the fans but not signing him will piss of the player's union. You don't want to make the player's union angry. -On the ESPN gabfests, they were already assuming the new Raiders coach would be James Lofton. So, naturally, the Chron is saying it just might......

Saints 34 49ers 10- For 49ers fans, this was a tough loss. And not just because the 49ers came up lacking against their first really good team in awhile. It's tough because it also turned out to be the official Reggie Bush coming out party and for the rest of the week, Niners fans will have to watch in horror as clip after clip after clip of their defense giving it up to Reggie will be played. One should wonder why it is that every other team was capable of bottling the dude up but the Niners couldn't. ...

Up to eleven people have been seriously injured this afternoon by a man driving around town, deliberately running over pedestrians. At least one person is dead. Among other things: this is not going to help our stats for this year's Walk SF numbers at all. The police caught a driver in a black Honda SUV in Laurel Heights, at Laurel and California Streets, where he'd hit two people (one who died). A child was also......

Shoppers trying to enjoy the a/c at the Oakridge Mall in San Jose on Sunday afternoon got less cool air than they were hoping for when the straining mall transformer outside the movie theater blew up. Witnesses reported seeing the lights flicker, hearing a huge boom, and then seeing sparks. In light of the panic and lack of power for the mall, Oakridge threw up its hands and decided just to close for the rest......

Last week, San Jose newspaper publishing company Knight-Ridder was purchased by another company, McClatchy. McClatchy then decided it didn't want to keep publishing the hometown newspaper of the company it had just purchased, the San Jose Mercury News, and put it up for sale. If the Merc News can't find a buyer, it may be forced to go under. The Merc News is a great paper putting out hard-hitting local journalism, and it would be a shame to see it go under. A couple of buyers have expressed interest, but readers and writers have expressed concerns that the interested parties will kill off the good qualities of the Merc. So the Merc News employees (and employees at other papers being sold off by McClatchy) are banding together -- they may try to buy the papers themselves. Also, the Merc News folks have launched a website, Save The Merc, to encourage a "news-friendly" organization to purchase the paper and keep high-quality journalism alive in the South Bay. It's not the best-designed website in the world, but the sincerity of the effort is totally real. Click here to lend your support to the Merc News journalists. ...

Last week's winner, the San Jose Metro. Phil Angelides made all his money in real estate. The Merc News gets in a screamy match with Baron Davis of the GSWarriors -- literally! Yay. Cover article: Muslim comedians (including this guy). Cirque du Soleil goes South Bay. Picture of Gillian Anderson looking like Madonna. And Straight Dope: can moms really lift cars off their children? Maybe. Next up, the SF Weekly. The editor's note re......

SFist is obsessed with traffic (even though we no longer drive to work). It comes from the 18 months we worked in the middle of a salt marsh in a big cubicle box overlooking 101 North in Menlo Park. (SFist knew it was time to quit that job when we started hoping for accidents on the way down so we could get to work that much later.) Like real estate and the NASDAQ, South Bay traffic is monitored closely as a proxy for the economic boom and bust cycle -- although oddly enough, traffic patterns appear to have no actual correlation with anything other than that one guy driving 40 in the fast lane....