FILM: In Being Michael Madsen, the titular star "turns the tables on notorious paparazzo, Billy Dant, by hiring a trio of documentary filmmakers to chronicle Dant's life, loves, and troubles." Crafty! The film also stars David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, and Virginia Madsen. Screens at The Roxie. READING: Michael Layne Heath and William Taylor Jr. read in honor of Abraham Lincoln's birthday (and of being our first gay Republican president!) at Dog Eared Books. *......

Another public display of commemorative prose, folks. What with this plus the animals trying to escape from the zoo, you'd think the end is nigh, a big earthquake is on its way, or Aunt Flo has come for an extended visit. While mincing down Third Street to AT&T Park to catch some tasty waves, we came across the most darling bouquet of fresh flowers, above, lying on the sidewalk. While trying to steal them, we......

Maybe Tony Hall needs to put a yellow sticky on his campaign credit card and label it "FOR CAMPAIGN USE ONLY" -- the SF Ethics Commission has decided to proceed on charges against the former city supervisor based on the alleged misuse of funds in his star-crossed attempt to run for mayor last year, and his defense is that he used the wrong credit card. Namely, that $320 of what Tony Hall characterized as "office......

This is the story behind the best egg nog--and the best egg nog traditions to accompany it. First, we must explain that this recipe is a secret. It was a secret when Mr. George P. Hunt pried it out of a man named Otis Terrell in Shanghai in 1926, and it was a secret when Mr. Terrell pried it out of Carl Seitz, a lumber executive from Virginia, some years before. We always take......

Granted that most you fresh food philosophers won't even know what we're talking about right now; you can thank your delicate palates and/or lactose intolerance for that. Feel free to tune into Check, Please! Bay Area while we warn the rest of the others about the following fast-food danger. General Mills has recalled five million frozen pizzas under the Totino’s Pizza and Jeno’s Pizza brands this morning. It appears that the Totino's recall is......

How can it be true that San Francisco is less green than Pelzer, South Carolina, or Hastings, Nebraska, or Fairfax, Virginia? Those are some of the cities beating out SF in Yahoo's greenest-cities contest. But you can make a difference! We've already jumped from 168th place to 16th, and your signups can push us up even higher. Plus, you get a free light bulb out of the deal. No more stumbling around when the......

Kenneth Eng: remember him? "Why I Hate Blacks" and the weird dragon fetish? Well, after he got fired from his columnist gig at San Francisco's Asianweek, we've gotten quite a bit of news updates about him -- his YouTube clips, his weird statements after the Virginia Tech tragedy, and, most intriguingly, a copy of the book proposal he was shopping around -- but we decided as an editorial matter we weren't going to run anything......

This is sort of out of SFist's coverage area, but in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and because the perpetrator is from Hayward, we're going ahead and putting something up: there was a shooting last night at Fresno State and one person is dead. The shooter, Jonquel Brooks from Hayward, is still at large and considered armed and dangerous. From the information the police have released, Brooks got in a fight with three......

Sadly, because the Virginia Tech shootings have, in a perverted way, inspired copycats, City College today was shut down because a copy cat threatened to start shooting students....

More mysterious criminal events in Fremont! This time, someone dropped a five-foot tall safe off a truck in the middle of the road. The safe had been pried open, revealing...... a collection of about 70 Star Wars action figures, still in their original packaging. Somewhere, a broken-hearted fan weeps. The yutz alert is on high after the horrific Virginia Tech tragedy: the UC Berkeley law student who posted a fake threat on a blog that......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

Here's todays wrapup of news stories....

Here's a list of things to do tonight...

The first weekend of the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments is in the books -- are you still alive in your office pool? Not if you took the Road to the Final Four less traveled.

If you went with the favorites, chances are you're sitting pretty. With the exception of the toothless male Badgers of Wisconsin, all first and second seeds in both tourneys advanced to the Sweet 16. That's not to say that a few high seeds didn't get a scare or that some middling seeds will never get a chance to germinate into full-blown Cinderellas, but overall, both tournaments are sticking to the script.

Here's todays daily sports roundup...

Total number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 48. Number of people pictured whom we recognize: 2 (Kamala Harris and Willie Brown, at separate events). Minority count: 3 (the two we recognized plus one more, or 6.25%). Getty v. Traina: 0-4. Gavin Newsom count: 0. Ironically, Swells appears to be the only Newsom-free zone in the entire Chronicle. When Dede Wilsey expects her latest project, the UCSF Mission Bay hospital, to be......

Okay, here's something that we've always wondered about in football-- why don’t coaches in the final minutes of a football let the other team score to get the ball back instead of letting the other team run down the clock and kick the game-winning field goal? Just look at the Eagles/Giants game. The Eagles were in easy field goal range with about two minutes to go and the Giants out of time outs. So the Eagles just ran the clock out and won the game with a last second field goal, something that was pretty much inevitable. So what if instead of doing what they did, the Giants let Westbrook run it in for a TD with a minute or so left so they could get the ball back? Wouldn’t that make more sense than hoping that some sort of fluke play occurs? If you were a coach, would you rather take your chances hoping that the team that's driving either screws up the field goal, fumbles, or gets backed up due to penalties or would you rather take a chance with your offense scoring again? ...

This, the first week after the holidays, is traditionally where Hollywood dumps all the crappy flicks that weren't good enough to release during the holidays. So any movie opening this week has to be viewed with suspicion....

And today's study unleashed upon the world concerns the chances the kids have of succeeding in life. According to said study, kids today in California don't have that much of a chance to succeed. Out of fifty states, we come in thirty-fourth. Ouch. That's way behind #1 state, Virginia but much better than lowly New Mexico which comes in at #50. Ha ha, sucks to be you. And here's our little questions-- how much credibility can you give a study that puts a state that came this close to electing George Allen as Senator as #1? ...

Don't forget, everyone, tolls went up on all local bridges starting yesterday -- so it's now $4 to cross any of the seven bridges run by the state: The Bay Bridge, the San Mateo, the Dumbarton, the Carquinez, the Richmond, and the Antioch (we always forget the Antioch [and the Benicia! Sorry! See comments below.]. Since the Golden Gate Bridge is run by a separate entity, it'll stay the same at $5 (unless, of course,......

We interrupt our sports coverage to give you this story. It's maybe not a local story, but we're sure it's of local interest. In fact, it's of national interest because it's just that good. And here it is: Dick Cheney's daughter, Mary, is pregnant. You know, Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter (oh wait, are we allowed to say that? When John Kerry did, he got taken to the cleaners for outing somebody who was already out). The one who has had a longtime partner that gets hidden every time Mary is out doing some sort of political thingy. Yep, she's pregnant. Dick Cheney's granddaughter is going to have two mommies. ...

We know this is completely wrong to admit, but voting here in San Francisco, the bluest of blue states, is always a bit unexciting. While the rest of the country is taking part in what we're always told is the Most Important Election Ever, we are once again left out of the thrills. Our gubernatorial race never took off and the race for Senate and Congress was such a no contest that one ran commercials featuring her grandchild and the other gave more speeches in Pennsylvania than here in her home city. It's kind of like rooting for the local Division AAA basketball team make their way through the Division AAA tourney while everyone else is obsessed with the NCAA Tourney. And while you want the local guys to win, you can't but help care more about schools you never attended in the Big Dance. What we're trying to say is that for whatever reason we seem more emotionally invested in the Virginia Senate Race than whatever is going on here. ...

Fall 2006 may very well go down in TV history as the year capital-A Actors decided doing a television show wasn't slumming it. Campbell Scott, James Woods, Hope Davis, Sally Field, Amanda Peet, and Timothy Hutton are just some of the relatively well-known actors making a first-time or return trip to network TV. Ray Liotta is another. His heist drama "Smith" premieres tonight on CBS at 10 p.m. If you have hopes that this......

Downieville, California. Deep in the heart of Gold Country. More than 150 years ago, the area was swarming with prospectors looking for gold. This past weekend, Downieville hearkened back to its pioneer days as a boom town, but instead of miners, drifters, and ladies of the evening lounging on the wooden boardwalks and hitching posts, mountain bikers of every age, size, color, and ability were in town looking to strike it rich in the 11th annual Downieville Classic -- uh, figuratively that is.

The Downieville Classic is actually three races: a downhill race, a point-to-point cross-country epic, and a combined downhill/cross-country competition just for the pros. Make no mistake, this is the most challenging set of mountain bike race courses on the West Coast, comparable with Snowshoe, West Virginia (when it's wet) or one of the high-altitude Colorado courses.

Honest to goodness, we weren't even planning on going to the Wired Rave Awards, much less wandering in uninvited (we've been, it's not all that). We just dropped by to hand off some equipment we'd borrowed to cover the "Mary Carey for Governor" campaign-cum-promotional junket at the Virgin Megastore for another New York-based blog publishing empire (no, not Weblogs, Inc. -- they're based out of Reston, Virginia now). Maybe it was the Thriftown suit and......

A new neighbor has moved into an old house in the 'hood, renovated the place and promises to be part of the community -- going to PTA meetings, Little League games, community centers and talking to local activists. But the guy you know and love will still come back and visit. Vienna, Virginia's Backfence has acquired Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere, garnering further citizen-media cred and a new market! Susan Mernit scooped the blogosphere yesterday morning,......

Boom! The San Jose federal building was evacuated for three hours yesterday afternoon after a federal employee found a suspicious-looking backpack-like object outside the building near South First Street with a note on it that said "boom." The bomb squad detonated the bag, which contained a metal box that made a loud crack (audio of the crack! Go Merc News!) heard through downtown. After an almost two-day search, firefighters finally found the body of a......

Back before the Wonderful World of the iPod (B.I.) when we used to listen to the radio, one of our favorite things was listening to KFOG's 10 at 10 on Friday the 13th. And we didn't even listen to KFOG (yes, Virginia, we listened to Live 105). We did, however, love listening to the 10 at 10 on Friday the 13th because on that day, they'd break from tradition and play "Hits from Hell." What are "Hits from Hell" you might be asking? Well things like "You Light Up My Life." Or the god-awful "We Built This City" or "We Are the World." It's nothing but pure, unadulterated crap music and there's nothing our cheese-loving, ironic-hipster-posing-hearts love more than crap music played for the sheer hell of it being crappy. Plus, it's one full hour in which KFOG won't play Bonnie Raitt, Coldplay or John Mayer. ...

Tired of Christmas Carols, Nutcrackers and even alternative holiday shows? Get back to some good ol' new plays by the city's best new-play companies....

We've written about the infamous Arnie in Rio video and we've linked to a recap of it written by one of our faithful readers, but we've actually never seen the video. But thanks to Popbitch, we finally were pointed in the right direction. So today during our lunch break, we sat down, put on the headphones and finally watched us some Arnie at Carnival. In a word, it was awesome....