With Gavin caught up in a tough re-election campaign against...ummm...well...huh.... he's started playing up his street people street cred. Recently, he announced a plan to deal with all the vagrants caught doing vagrant-like by sending out "Homeless Outreach Teams" to deal with it. The teams consist of police officers and social services and when they catch somebody doing something unpleasant, they're supposed to give them a choice between going into outreach services or being issued a citation, which as far as we can tell, is the handing out of giant frowny faces that will be put on a giant white board in the local police station. The program will be focused on targeted areas around Union Square and SOMA, read, tourist traps. Apparently, tourists don't appreciate seeing people defecate in the streets while riding the Cable Cars and eating soup in a sourdough roll-- kinda gives new meaning to the phrase "San Francisco Treat." Gavin has been putting putting some of these policies into effect lately but is now making a bigger deal out of it. ...

Here's todays sports news...

It is not often that an event we attend simply blows away its billing. Friday night, however, we managed to procure tickets to the single greatest game in the last 13 years of Warriors home game history. We watched the Warriors fearlessly and recklessly dismantle the Dallas Mavericks as the Warriors guards absolutely abused the Mavericks back court and the front line compensated their (relatively) small dimensions with oversized heart, hustle, desire and effort.......

Big G took a break from his busy thunder-stealing schedule on Sunday to watch his lady friend, Jennifer Siebel, act her heart out at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose. The movie is The Trouble With Romance. It looks amazing. ...

If Alex Tourk had a MySpace page, he would have moved Gavin from the #1 spot on his Top 8 after he heard about the affair, and deleted Gavin as a friend. So Gavin trying to be nice on Alex's birthday was like Gavin trying to re-friend Alex, and being denied. Gavin's gonna rot in Alex's hypothetical friend request box for all of eternity because they aren't even RealSpace friends anymore....

This weather? Bugs. Bugs us all to hell. It's not that it's rainy. We can handle the rain, or at least be okay with it. It's always rainy this time of year. No. What's getting to us is the whole schizo-ness of the weather. First it's sunny. Then it rains. For about ten minutes. Then it stops for a few hours. Then it rains again for a few minutes. Then it's sunny again. For a few minutes. Then it rains again, usually at the exact moment we get off of BART or are coming back from lunch. ...

We keep saying we're going to start a We Read The Glossies column to cover San Francisco Magazine and 7x7, but you know, we just can't do it. As a very wise co-editor of ours once said, "it's like reading someone else's yearbook." Well, there's even less reason to read the rapidly-diminishing content in the local glossies this month -- San Francisco magazine unilaterally pulled an article they were planning on running about sexual harassment allegations at the Thunder Valley casino near Sacramento (side note -- shouldn't Sacramento Magazine be running that article instead? Just a thought.) -- because the new publisher of SF Magazine was worried that Thunder Valley's owner would pull their advertising out of the magazine (for the other casino they own, the Red Rock). However, the Thunder Valley owners were like, "we didn't lodge any complaints about it at all." The new publisher, Modern Luxury, is refusing to comment, and the president of the magazine was all like, "well, yes, we did pull the piece, but it was for a lot of different reasons." The executive editor is fuming, not the least because the story then got snapped up by Salon, which ran it today. (We don't have the attention span to sit through that ad they make you sit through to read their articles, but we'll give you the link anyways.) John Burks, a SFSU journalism prof (who was a editor at SF Magazine's former incarnation, San Francisco Focus) is hopping mad about the whole thing. "I don't think of myself as the Lone Ranger, but if you're going to do that, why do journalism? Why not just put out catalogs?" Or yearbooks! ...

It's raining buckets out there. It's raining so hard, it's practically washed the streets of North Beach clean of tourists. Not only that, but we're getting some exciting thunder and lightning! Man are we glad we got all our moving done last weekend -- we saw one poor soul driving an open-bed pickup that had wood furniture and an uncovered mattress. Moving a mattress is one thing, moving a wet mattress is really gonna......

Folks are lining up for rabies shots in San Ramon, after a cute stray kitten turned out to carry the virus. Authorites estimate that about 60 people were in contact with the kitten, and that 35 people would have to get shots (including one person who was bitten). 26 other people are also getting shots as a precaution. One vet noted that the kitten had gotten a lot of attention because it was just so darned cute. "Everyone loves a kitten." Two pit bulls were euthanized in Concord today, after they killed four animals in a neighbor's yard last Friday. The owner had kenneled the two dogs but claims that they escaped when they got spooked by the thunder and lightning last week. The dogs killed their neighbors' two cats, a goat, and a bunny. Animal Control got to the scene right as the dogs were in the rabbit hutch, and they report that the dogs were so intent on the rabbit that they didn't even notice the fuzz. The dogs also killed four other animals in the neighborhood that evening. ...and we know we're stepping a little on SFist Rain's territory here -- but hey! New Animal Cops SF episodes just appeared on our TiVo! Starting next week! Yay, more Lieutenant Michael Scott! ...

Here we are playing the old curmudgeon again -- but, seriously, we can't stand being buzzed by those super loud, super scary Blue Angels as they practice their feats of derring-do around the oversized office bulding we work in. Last year we were spared their scare tactics, as they didn't come around for Fleet Week. This year, it looks as though we'll be hiding under our desk again every time they thunder by, just......

Man, it was a busy weekend -- anti-war protests, the Love Parade, the Folsom Street Fair -- and not to mention Webzine 2005 and the ragingly hot SFist/Webzine kickoff party. Thanks for stopping by, Webziners! ...or maybe you stayed in and reviewed your options for the new TV season. There's always some baseball or football on too, along with more Sex In The City than you can shake a pair of $100 shoes at. That is, if your TiVo's still working! Other things we learned -- did you know you can detonate a bomb using a cell phone? Do you tip the cabby less than $2? (What if the fare's $8.50 and all you have is a ten?) Was that thunder we heard the other day? Is that Ross Mirkarimi giving you mouth-to-mouth? Phew! We're exhausted! Peel us a grape! Picture by Melissa Schneider...

So far there have been at leat 2 LOUD thunder rolls, the air has a distinct mid-fall feel to it and rain is still possible if not imminent in SF and around the Bay Area. Area rainfall for September is extremely light, averaging below .6 inches everywhere, some places seeing only .1 inches. Rain is definitely a plus for cleaning off roads, sidewalks, and structures from accumulated build-up during a long dry period and......

We headed over to Bimbo's last night with some degree of trepidation, since our favorite rock critic in the whole world, Kelefa Sanneh, had just described headliners the Go! Team as "a British indie-pop version of the Black Eyes Peas," and not in the good way. (Vote for Kelefa (and Will Shortz) in the Gawker NY Times hotties poll!) So okay, we were a little skeptical when the lights went down and the stage lights were set on "swively" and the fun "the band is coming on stage!!!!" music started up, and this teensy woman with a huge voice and hardcore British accent starts scream/rapping over the horn section and harmonica and bass and two drum sets. It also did not help our mood that there was a couple, the man-half of which with that distinctive indie-rocker b.o., making out with the thrashing arm and leg motions that only new couples with an exhibitionist streak like to do. But... it is a testament to the power of the Go! Team's relentless positivity!!!!! that we shook off our befuddlement and decided we were having a funky-fresh good ol' time! They were totally like a cartoon band, like Josie and the Pussycats, or Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi --like, we had this feeling that on the way to the gig, the Go! Team had just saved the universe from space creatures or stopped a series of bank heists or something, and that any second later, we would fade to black and the Hanna Barbera logo would do its trademark swoopy synthesizer rotation. ...

Of course, any sort of discussion about flooding caused by rain in these here parts must always be tempered by what happened in South-East Asia, but due to all the almost biblical amount of rain going down in the area, flooding is becoming a problem. Today, parts of the Embarcadero were closed and huge parts of Marin were completely covered in water. Which, of course, meant huge traffic jams onto the Golden Gate Bridge and......