Photo credit goes to Kevin Montreuil. One of the federal buildings in the Tenderloin is thoughtlessly tagged with some thoughtful graffiti. According to livinintheloin: I live right on UN Plaza, so my walk to the BART hole is a short one...[t]his morning as I round my building, I noticed the smell of urine, and something else. I don’t actually LOL that often, but today I did. The door on the side of the building......

Photo of Union Street repaving...

Get that gigantic backpack and sleeping bag and trek on over to Cody's Books on Fourth Street, as Tony and Maureen Wheeler, the founders of Lonely Planet, read from their new books, Unlikely Destinations (the story of Lonely Planet) and Bad Lands (Tony's trips to dangerous countries). If you can't make tonight's reading (7 p.m.), they're in town through Friday, reading at Get Lost in SF tomorrow night and Book Passage in Corte Madera on......

Pee-yoo. Workers fixing the pipes on Valencia Street near Tiffany Avenue (behind St. Luke's) opened a 100-year-old unused cast-iron pipe in the ground, which released what Bay City News is delicately referring to as "a noxious odor." The odor was sufficiently noxious that 30-some people in the area got sick (nausea, dizziness, vomiting) and around 11-13 people went inside to St. Luke's to get treated. Ironically, the rest of the workers at St. Luke's were......

You may be shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn that sometimes, some of the people who come to the Castro for Halloween are not entirely well-behaved. Fortunately, after last year's shootings and stabbings, Bevan promised to plan ahead to make 2007 safer. And he did! After some reminding by the BAR, which ran an article last week about how he totally forgot to do that planning he'd been talking about. Now it looks like......

There's sort of a weird story of NIMBYism going on in Berkeley and that is that a shelter is being kicked out of Solano Avenue due to the usual reasons-- noise, smell, and dirty streets-- except in this case, the shelter is for pets. The place that's being kicked out is the nonprofit Milo Foundation and their sin is of barking animals, excessive dog shit, and the smell of piss wafting through the air. In other words, their being kicked out for being a little too much like Duboce Park....

Now that we were back, we were looking forward to waiting for MUNI and smelling all the chocolate-y goodness of the new aromatic "Got Milk?" ads (insert Got MUNI? joke here). But alas, we came back a day late and a dollar short. Due to the usual stuff, the chocolate-smelling bus stops are no more. Meet the new MUNI bus stop, same as the old MUNI bus stop. ...

We are getting very psyched up as the annual Stern Grove festival opens next Sunday. Every city in the world can offer free live entertainment, but only SF can do it with such spectacular backdrops. Fireworks, shmireworks, we say, unless we have the bay in the background. Bike races are boring, they run in circles, unless they follow the course of the Bullit car race. And summer concerts are just not the same when......

Our in-house alki staggers out of Il Piratta....

...because we love the smell of cheap newsprint! This week in the Weekly -- new column: The Infiltrator, who does things you always wondered about, such as being interviewed by SFist. This week, the Infiltrator wreaks havoc in an office executive etiquette class. Okay, this column is pretty genius; here's the link. Long Matt Smith column about Hetch Hetchy. Cover article: Franz Ferdinand (looking like the Amish in the City Amish kids on the cover)......