The Pope, Linda Blair, and the Vatican’s "exorcist-in-chief." [BeyondChron] SF park improvement ballot measure benefits few. [Curbed]Macworld Keynote 2008 predictions form contest. Very nice. [Laughing Squid] The Chicken McNoggin and other vile food products. [SFoodie] Google Maps will display live Iowa caucus results. [ValleyWag] Swish says see ya. [SFGate] New science-fiction blog! [io9] And finally, Obama and Huckabee pull off surprising wins in Iowa caucuses. [Salon] Image: BeyondChron......

Today's victim of the SFist interview has only been in our fair city for a couple of weeks, but that doesn'r mean we're going to take it easy on him! His new book, Alcoholica Esoterica, is a easily-digestible and very, very funny history of booze and drinking, and it comes out tomorrow! We here at SFist welcome Ian to San Francisco and eagerly anticipate the day he ventures out of his living room and......

The Madcat Women's International Film Festival continued last Wednesday night at El Rio with intermittantly interesting animated shorts in Amok-imation. Highlights: "Give AIDS the Freeze," a 1950s social hygiene film, repurposed with a scratchy overlay of messages about AIDS. Footage of a stodgy scientist entombed in an animated condom with the message "Insist that he wear one" -- cute and clever. Also good: "Small & Deep, Love Stories." High-falutin' title, but nevertheless humble and......

In order to provide you, dear readers, with the best content we can provide, SFist occasionally has to delve into things with which we might not want to delve into. Case in point is the release of the sixth Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Many of you might care about the release of this book and because it might be of interest, we shall write about it. Us? We don't care at all about any of this. The only reason why we read the first five books- twice- was merely out of some morbid curiosity to see what the entire hubbub was. And the only reason why we'd very often find ourselves up way past our bedtime reading the book wasn't because we couldn't put it down but because we were so unenthused about the book, we just couldn't wait to finish them. Nope. Don't care about Harry Potter at all. But as we said, many do. So much so, in fact, the Gavster has proclaimed Friday to be "All Potter's Eve," as did Mayor Matt Neely of Mountain View. The Pope even weighed in on the books, calling them "seductive" and "corrupting" to little children and there's so many jokes to be made here that we have a headache just thinking about them. And as usual whenever something this big happens, the business sections are full of stories about how Harry Potter might just be able to save independent bookstores. Or keep people from seeing the new remake of Willie Wonka. In fact, anticipation has run so high for this book that the Onion joked that security on the books were better than that of our public transit system and Gawker commented that it's probably true. Measures, however, haven't been good enough to keep all the books secure as various bookstores around the world have accidentally sold a few copies. ...

The Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church gave a sermon at the late morning service commemorating the good works of Pope John Paul II. Part way through, his wife handed him a note. After finishing his sermon, he asked "the young man in the back to come forward." Well, the young man in question is everyone's favorite third world economic development spokesman, iPod shill and occassional rock 'n roll frontman Bono of U2,......