The man accused of assaulting and kidnapping Elie Wiesel -- attempted kidnapping, false imprisonment, battery, stalking, elder abuse and hate crimes, to be exact -- changed his not guilty plea to one of insanity today. Earlier this year, if you recall, Eric Hunt, 23, stalked and dragged the Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor from an elevator at the Argent Hotel (recently re-branded Westin San Francisco Market Street, even though it's totally located on......

-- Newsom bats his eyes at progressives. [BeyondChron] -- Blue Angels to be banned in SF? [Examiner] -- Islamic Center of the East Bay's recent blaze decried as an "act of terror" by local Muslim leaders. [Chron] -- Man who attacked Holocaust survivor/scholar Elie Wiesel at Westin San Francisco Market Street (formerly the Argent Hotel) apologizes. Aw. Warm fuzzies for all. [ABC 7] -- Benjamin Wachs on crime and Big Brother. No, not Big......

Nobel Prize winning author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was assaulted in a San Francisco hotel on February 1st by a Holocaust denier. Wiesel was in town-- irony alert-- for a Peace Conference. He was staying at the Argent Hotel and was apparently being stalked. When the man got into the same elevator with Wiesel, he asked to talk to him and when Wiesel told him he'd do it in the lobby instead of the elevator, the man dragged him out of the elevator and tried to drag him into a room. When Wiesel started screaming for help, the man ran off, freeing the author. Soon after, the cops came and escorted Wiesel to the airport where he promptly got the hell out of town. ...

So, of course, we were busy yukking it up with funnyman Merlin Mann last night at the Web 1.0 confab. Silly us, making fun of the 'monetizing,' 'paradigm shifting,' 'game changing' intellects who took a bunch of great ideas from engineers and developers and turned them into marketing juggernauts, with or without a business plan. Let's just say that VRML, FrontPage, Flash, the <blink> tag, dual ISDN and other ante-dot-bomb technologies were rightly pilloried......

Imagine how excited we were to hear this morning through the PR Newswire that your humble little -ist website had been nominated for a prestigious "Pubby" Award! A "Pubby"! For best Bay Area blog! The competition was stiff (SiliconValleyWatcher.org, DaveyD.com, splendora.com, and travelblog.org) -- but we were hopeful that we'd be invited to the 9th Annual SF Bay Area Publicity Club Pubby Awards lunch ceremony to pick up our prize! So we were all excitedly planning on what we were going to wear to the lunch ceremony at the Argent Hotel, practicing batting our eyelashes for lunch MC Liam Mayclem from channel 5 -- when SFist Eve (always the most eagle-eyed among us) noticed -- hey, this lunch is scheduled for today! Guess we didn't win, huh? Well, fine! We didn't want to win anyways! We've never even heard of the Bay Area Publicity Club! What's a "Pubby," anyways? No, it's okay, we're fine -- but, well, shoot, Bay Area Publicity Club -- you guys could have at least told us we were nominated a little bit earlier, so we'd at least have had our concession speech to, say, DaveyD.com all prepared and ready to go. (note: we actually have no idea who won, since we get no actual communication from the BAPC). A little harsh to issue a press release to us that basically says we've already lost, too! ...

After six weeks of fruitless negotiations, the San Francisco hotel workers union, UNITE 2, has called for a two-week strike, until October 13. The boycott is against the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group, which includes the Argent Hotel, the Hilton San Francisco, the Crowne Plaza Union Square and the Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental (SFist will be moving its staff meeting from the Top of the Mark). ...