We were in the Upper Haight last night, walking with friends along the street to the Magnolia for a late-ish dinner. We walked past a small group of punk-ish kids sitting on the street with a "give us some money [insert ironic saying here]" sign. They were talking with a guy who was standing there with a beautiful husky dog on a leash. We'll repeat - that dog was gorgeous. As we passed by, the......

Among San Francisco’s myriad neighborhoods, few are as widely misunderstood as the Outer Sunset. Location certainly plays a role. To your average Upper Haight resident – to say nothing of your average South of Market or North Beach resident – this beach-adjacent community may seem as distant as Honolulu, with an N-Judah trip that may rival a flight to Oahu in terms of travel time. But it’s sometimes easy to forget that San Francisco is a mere seven miles wide, and that the folks out west do have phone numbers that begin with 415, rather than 808....

A man in a black leather jacket carefully backs his Yamaha into one of the six motorcycle spaces on Haight at the corner of Shrader. He's here to see Pinback's in-store performance at Amoeba Music across the street later in the evening, but he's also pulled his bike into a world where the warm early evening air is alternately punctured by the scent of patchouli, McChickens, pee, and smoke from silly cigarettes. Plenty of off-street fee parking and reminders of the 1960s glory days are also available. Certain parts of Haight between Shrader and Stanyan have seen better commercial days – specifically, the shuttered and boarded Cala supermarket at its west end, and on a much lesser scale, the former home of taco/burrito retailer Chabela's at 1805 (dormant since the mid-'00s) – and there's no escaping the persistently suffocating sense of flower power and "revolution" around here anytime soon. (Kind bud?) The vibe on the block's sidewalks can be construed as seamy or circus-like (or perhaps both), depending upon one's tolerance for American Youth in Very Big Pants, or for politely deranged men pushing shopping carts and singing "COME TO AFRICA!!" at the top of their high-pitched lungs. But regardless of one's frame of reference, there's always a lot to take in down here in Amoeba Gulch....

For those of you keeping track: --In Oakland, five people have been killed in the last 48 hours (from noon on Wednesday to early this morning). The one this morning is murder number 64 in Oakland. --In SF, they're investigating the death of Joe Konopka, a neighborhood anti-crime activist from the Upper Haight. No one's giving out many details but it looks S&M-related. Konopka started the group Residents Against Druggies, which confronted dealers on the......

Quick -- which one of those pictures above is of Valencia Street in SF and which is of Williamsburg in Brooklyn? Bay Area blogger Overstated has put together his list of what New York neighborhoods correspond to which San Francisco ones. Check out his list, and let the great debates begin! Here's some calls we agree with: --Totally Williamsburg is the Mission. Last time we were on Bedford Avenue, honest to God we thought......

We used to live in the Cole Valley (well, technically it was Upper Haight but nobody likes to admit they live in Upper Haight) and during the weekend’s almost every drive way had a car parked in it, especially at night when everyone went out and about in the neighborhood. One night, around midnight, one of our crazy neighbors came home only to find a car parked in her driveway, blocking her from parking her own car in her very own garage. So she started screaming at the top of her lungs about how she can't get into her garage and how she's going to kill whomever parked the car in her driveway and how they spend all this money to have a garage and how they’re tired and not healthy and how they were going to get the car towed unless somebody came down. After about five minutes of screaming, somebody sheepishly went down to move their car. Crisis averted. ...

Last week's winner, the East Bay Express: Well, this is interesting! Bottom Feeder Will Harper is leaving the EBX to become the executive editor of the SF Weekly. We're sorry to see Harper leave, but we're excited to see what he does at the sister SF publication! Plus, this collection of Bottom Feeder's greatest hits is pretty exciting. We may not be making as much money off stem cells as everyone says we will --......

One year ago, husband and father Jerry Tang disappeared from his Upper Haight apartment. He hasn't been seen since. Tonight, his wife held a vigil in Golden Gate Park to remind people that Jerry is still missing and to encourage people to keep looking for him. Jerry Tang had suffered a stroke a few years back, and required daily seizure medication to function -- his family thinks he may be alive but unaware of his......

Election-free edition! --Are the A's moving to Fremont? --Ken Garcia enjoyed Borat. --They're going to start Translink (the one pass that works on all Bay Area public transportation systems) soon! BART, Muni, and Caltrain are expected to start accepting Translink in 2007. --Google's going to start buying ads in newspapers. Cute -- they call it "offline media." --YouTube wins Time Magazine's Invention of the Year award, beating out the cervical cancer vaccine and hypoallergenic cats.......

Submissions go to yvesdroppings at gmail dot com. Female clerk yelling at male (clerk? boyfriend? whipping boy?): "TIM! Get up here and wipe the blood off this bill right now. It's grossing me out." -- From Ginevra/An Upper Haight liquor store Cell phone woman: "Now all I need is some clean pee." - From Red Dixon/Sixth St.......

Hooray! The Board of Supervisors has agreed to allow beer and wine to be served at the Red Vic movie theatre. While a moratorium had been called on new liquor licenses in the Upper Haight, the newly-approved bill is intended to override that in the case of the worker owned and operated single-screen movie theater. The Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi-penned ordinance goes into effect immediately, but the Red Vic still had several hurdles to leap.......

All this over the protests of Joltin' Joe O'Donoghue and his buddies because of her pregnant condition. With job finally assured, she promptly celebrated by going out on maternity leave where we all thought things would go happily ever after. But no. Now, her entire family is basically living in the living room of their duplex apartment in Upper Haight because she was hit with a late appeal on an already given out permit to re-do her top floor. A re-do that had already been started and now can't be worked on until at least a hearing on Dec. 14th. ...

While we were on vacation, those long-rumored changes to the BART schedule happened. It didn't take us long to figure out what it all meant-- longer waits and more crowded trains. Not quite N Judah at rush hour crowded, but still kind of crowded. Crowded enough we sometimes had to share our usually comfy seat with another person. We, however, weren't the only people to notice the same thing. BART did too. And you know......

Time once again for another two fingers of truth, lit on fire and chugged before being hastily chased by a PBR back. As long as Prohibition has still been repealed, Barrespondent Drew will be there to try new places out. Well, bad luck, poor decision making and/or godawful planning have landed us in the Upper Haight again, stuck between 3 head shops, 2 Starbucks and a store that appears to have used T-shirts on sale......