Viral marketing returns to our sidewalks. ...

We were idiots this morning and clicked on a Google ad this morning for The Hayes, that new condo building on Page near Market. We bike past it nearly every morning, and we were curious as to what it looked like inside. When the window popped up, we were immediately irritated because an idiotic faux-cool downtempo ambient electronic track started randomly playing - we couldn't find a mute button on the site because it......

With the sun out, the temperatures high, one can only think of one thing-- what's going on in the World of the -ist's? Bostonist dug deep to uncover Barack Obama's unpaid parking tickets, their Governor's latest ethical lapse, and a plagarizing sports writer. Chicagoist had everything in twos: two views on having the Olympics, losing two members of their Super Bowl team, and two music festivals. DCist put their noses in legal books as......

We saw this story about problems involving the building of a helipad for SF General and our first, initial thought was yawn. Then we digged around a bit (with help from SFist Jim) and realized, of course, this is San Francisco which means nothing is that easy and everyone goes around saying and doing silly things. In this case, we have NIMBYism, web sites, discussion of class issues, and guerilla art. Yes, guerrila art over a helipad. You can't say we don't have a sense of proportion over things here in San Francisco. Maybe there should be a mural done at Precita Eyes?...

Every once in awhile, SFist likes to get out of our pajamas and take the SFist show on the road. So we pick up our trusty laptop and head on out to go work at a coffee shop. There's one we especially like to go to-- it's small, extremely cute and cozy, and has plenty of outlets for everyone to plug in. There's only one problem, though, and that even at like two in the afternoon, they're usually too full for us to get a table. And so we go to another place only to discover that they too are completely full. It's two in the afternoon, doesn't anybody have jobs? ...

Here are two good web sites that you should enjoy. They don't really have that much in common, but they're both good. ...

A reader sent us this link to one of those "March of Progess" type newsreels from 1945 about us, the Bay Area. It's basically all about how we're on the cutting edge of everything, made from steely gold miner types who built the area out of nothing. It comes with lots of great music, a cartoon character, and that sunny optimism that's fueled more than enough "Simpson's" parodies. ...

We got two interesting web sites/Google Maps to let everyone know about. ...

For a while, we could not write a post about modern music without quoting the influence of Igor Stravinsky. Eve, then our dear editor, even made fun of us. Tonight, we will be vindicated. Not to ruin the suspense, but today’s episode of Keeping Score, the SF Symphony award winning behind-the-scene program, will highlight Stravinsky as a revolutionary. If MTT says so, we can keep mentioning Igor every time we want, he must have been influential. ...

It looks like all those Comedy Central videos are back well most of them, on YouTube as Viacom and Google worked something out. And so ends the battle that led to a thousand blogger rants. ...

We've held out this long, and we're only gonna make this jokes once, but this summer, watch out for... Drinks on a plane! (We'll now run across the street and demand of the priest an appropriately harsh prescription for penance.) But don't worry, technology and, to a lesser extent, the Bush and Blair administrations, are here to protect you. With biometric terrorist detectors, other tech that's been around for generations, and the latest in arbitrary......

We finally have a new head of the Taxi Commission, that being the old head, Heidi Machen. We certainly hope she enjoyed her month-long vacation. Unlike her previous reign, however, Gavin gave her some homies to have her back and finally replaced three outgoing commissioners whose terms had already expired. Gavin should have done this earlier, but it got in the way of his appearing on morning radio shows. ...

One of the more amazing facts about Bay Area Craigslist is its complete ubiquity. It is almost to the point where you can't live your life with it. How do people find rentals? Craiglist. How do people shop for goods? Craigslist. In other words, we have it pretty gosh-darn nice here. We don't need to search multiple web sites to find apartments, nor do we need to look at newspaper classifieds to find used bicycles. Instead we have a single omnipresent source (with a nice search engine to boot!) which does all of this for us. The rest of the world is not so lucky. Let's say that, for some crazy, crazy reason, you are looking for housing in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that LA has many times the population of San Francisco, it only has half the housing listings that the Bay Area does. Or, hypothetically speaking, lets say we wanted to find a pick-up soccer game in San Diego. Ugh. There are a third as many community listings in San Diego as there are in the Bay Area, despite the fact that they have roughly the same population. Or say you want to do anything in Pittsburgh, PA, St. Louis, MO or Tampa, FL? Well, you are out of luck finding it on Craigslist. To put this in perspective, only one of the top 10 city areas in the country (New York) has more listings than the Bay Area. Wow. SFist Nick, contributing. All numbers, ratios, etc. were computed 04/09/2006. Image from artoftravelworldwide.com ...