Tom Vanderbilt, why have you forsaken us? The author of the recently published Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) is on the west coast at this very minute doing "lots of media" and guest-blogging for Powell's Books. But NOT appearing in San Francisco. As far as we know. What, traffic not bad enough on Market St.? 880 moving too smoothly for you? Guest-blogging for Modern Times not......

Photo by Ando Caulfield (By Travis Jensen -- welcome him, won't you? Jensen will be chiming in at SFist now and then, and we're elated to have him aboard.) Skatebook release party Celebrate the release of the second issue of Skatebook tonight at FTC Skate Shop in Upper Haight. Skatebook is a quarterly skateboarding zine from former pro skater Salman Agah and photographer Mike Ballard. Copies of the second issue will be free to......

*CLUB: Check out Rock Out Karaoke over at Amnesia. What is Rock Out Karaoke? Well, it mean that you will hear neither a Righteous Brothers cover nor a note from everyone's least favorite musical, Grease. And isn't that what you really want in a karaoke night? Of course it is. (Glenny Kravitz hosts.) READING: Sorry to throw another Valencia Street happening your way, but: author and artist Ian Philips, of Suspect Thoughts Press, reads......

Starting sometime in April, library books will be available at Contra Costa County BART stations via "ATM style lending machines." A new program called Library-a-Go-Go, along with the Contra Costa County Library, will allow BART riders to simply swipe a card, select a book, wait for said book choice to drop, and then return the book after the rider is finished reading their literary gem. The machines will "hold around 400 popular and best-selling......

LIVE MUSIC: Parenthetically named '80s pop outfit Was (Not Was) is known for the song, "Walk the Dinosaur" And that ditty? Went a little something like this: "Open the door, get on the floor/Everybody walk the dinosaur/Boom boom acka-lacka lacka boom." Bring your favorite Gen-Xer to hear them live at Cafe Du Nord. *FILM: Just in time to make you feel less bad about being single on Valentine's Day is Woody Allen's Annie Hall.......

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. *......

Valentine's Day, a manufactured holiday to celebrate love, has always seemed to divide people into categories--not bring them together. The couples, the single, the.. quirkyalones? We ran across this website through Digg and are intrigued by the manifesto (of sorts) for what International Quirkyalone Day means to them: International Quirkyalone Day is a do-it-yourself celebration of romance, friendship, and independent spirit. It's a celebration of all kinds of love: romantic, platonic, familial, and yes, self-love.......

Now that donuts have made a return to Bay Area coffee houses--minus its exhausting Homer Simpsonesque, white-trash irony--you can find the preferable pastries at places like Ritual Coffee Roasters (vegan! and actually good!), Seattle's Best at Border's Books & Music (double-glazed), and even Starbucks (plasticky). With the return of the donut comes the return of the brewed coffee. At least, according to today's New York Times, which profiles the Blue Bottle Cafe, scheduled to......

They still make phone books?...

Ever since the SFist Reads column turned us back onto the awesomeness of checking books out of the SF Public Library, we've been big fans of the First Stop area of the Main Library, where the library put all their books they'd acquired in the last two years. We've spent many a pleasant few hours checking out the latest memoirs, or all the books in the 300 section, or randomly pulling out titles in the......

SFist interviews Crispin Hellion Glover, who is screening his films at the Castro Theater this weekend. ...

The sexy cats over at ValleyWag have the fresh MySpace office shots that you want. Or not. Formerly the home of LookSmart, the new space will be able to call other fresh, hip, cutting edge, perpetually hungover, youth-oriented spots like Current TV, SF Weekly, Wired, Chronicle Books, Sammy Hagar's place to do body shots, that abnormally chic pet store, Happy Donut, Nova, and even the flophouse that also known as SFist as their neighbors.......

SFist interviews Onion editor, Joe Randazzo...

The cold weather - and holiday festivities - descended upon Gothamist. The Rockefeller Christmas tree was lit, Broadway stagehand finally ended their strike, and NASCAR decided to run their victory lap through Times Square. There were disturbing photographs revealing the working conditions in which many city manholes are produced and ninjas were also a hot topic, either robbing homes or entering into alibis. But the city was really rocked by how Rudy Giuliani's visits......

Yup, "the Paris of the West". It's a phrase that's been liberally applied to our fair city, perhaps most notably when the mayor of the Paris of, um, "France", arrived in San Francisco last November to commemorate the 10th anniversary of our "Sister Cities" agreement. Never heard it? A quick Googling brings up a hefty 7500 matches, and as the scanning of turn-of-the-century tomes marches forward, that number will certainly increase. But to the......

After paying up last year for disclosure violations, Senator Carole Migden is once again under investigation for not disclosing or itemizing credit card charges that total $397,000. According to the LA Times, she faces $60,000 in administrative fines if she's in breach, our Miss Migden has investigators looking all up in her credit card charging for over the past seven years. Yikes. The main cause of concern for not keeping tidy books is that......

Poring over Entertaining the other night, because our pulverized sleeping aid refused to kick in, we got so excited after reading "Bouillabaisse for Twelve to Sixteen". But now any plans of having said bouillabaisse party must be put on hold. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suspended all fishing and crab hunting until the first of December. You hear that? Dungeness crab season won't happen this month. There's nothing you can do about it expect curl up......

The Brothers Green -- San Francisco Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi spoke to a large and enthusiastic crowd at the 2007 Green Festival. GreenFestival 2007 is now in the history books. See some photos and some noteworthy exhibits after the jump.......

The gentlemen at Valleywag have footage of this week's all-YouTube episode of Oprah. (Et tu, Oprah?) Steve Chen and Chad Hurley tell the now famous story about their company's conception. It seems, according to them, that during a SF dinner party at Chen's "friends filmed each other with videocameras (!), and then realized the videos were hard to share." Then like magic -- poof! -- YouTube came about, turning a voyeuristic dinner host into......

By Frances Reade Eugene Robinson has been the leader of S.F.'s most dangerous art-rock band Oxbow since 1989. We don’t mean Oxbow is "dangerous" as in "Tipper-Gore-no-likey." We mean "dangerous" like “Eugene is known to lurch into the crowd mid-set and strangle irritating audience members into unconsciousness." "Dangerous" as in "the man strips down and brandishes his pee-pee in a threatening manner onstage." "Dangerous” as in… "awesome." Besides slinging 18 years of sweet, sludgy......

Found Magazine's inexhaustible founders, Davy and Peter Rothbart, will be at Berkeley's Pegasus Books tonight and at SF's The Dark Room on Thursday night for Found's "There Goes the Neighborhood Tour 2007." We're excited to see what's in Davy's trunk of "sparkling, brand-new finds" and be privy to Peter's songs based on notes from Found #5, aka "The Crime Issue." The Bay Area marks the halfway point in the bros.' "65-city, 36-state, 3-month rampage!" Found......

Prints + good tunes = the Pipettes -- The Pipettes: This all-female, British, Phil-Spector-sounding band gains more and more popularity by the day. See them tonight so that by next year when they're too big for SF venues, you can say you saw them when. They perform with Social Studies and Monster Bobby (read our interview with him here!) -- the Ladybug Transistor, who were scheduled to go on, will not be appearing -- tonight......

The mathematics of the Lights Out San Francisco event....

The SF Public Library's holding a good old-fashioned photo drive! One day only! Today! They're looking to add to their Historical Photograph Collection, and they need your help -- but heterosexuals need not apply. Ha ha, just kidding, heterosexuals can help too! But seriously, they don't want pictures of straight people. The "Shades of LGBTQI" project is looking for donations from the community; they want photographs -- physical or digital -- that have something......

The remaining fall TV premieres are trickling in, with two bowing tonight. The first is another in a string of current shows to be set in our fair city. It's called "Women's Murder Club" and it premieres on ABC at 9 p.m. Has anyone seen Angie Harmon running around town sporting a badge? If not, it's probably because like so many other San Francisco shows, much of it is actually filmed elsewhere. Based on......

"Tales Of Mere Existence" By Levni R. Yilmaz Esq HEY! I'll be selling books at the SF Zine Fest Friday & Saturday. Friday, October 5 from 2:00pm - 8:00pm Saturday, October 6 from 11:00am - 7:00pm The Women's Building 3543 18th St. (between Valencia and Guerrero) in the Mission District of San Francisco Email Lev. Buy a Comic/DVD set from Lev! http://www.ingredientx.com/buy/main.htm For more comics, animations and correspondence, kindly visit http://www.ingredientx.com If you gravitate......

Ever think of starting your own crafty business? Want to meet a bunch of people who have, including a local author who wrote a book on the topic? Or maybe you just want to surround yourself with booze and cute people? Whatever your flavor, head downtown to 111 Minna tomorrow night for the book-launch party of Craft, Inc. by Meg Mateo Ilasco. The party is being hosted by Rare Device, a hip housewares store......

Critical Mass in San Francisco turns 15 years old. ...

Don't just read any words -- read good words, accurate and specific, tasty and gratifying and placed in sequences that make you shake your head in disbelief that anyone could possibly have ever used those words in sentences other than the ones on the page in front of you. You certainly won't find that here; but check out Booksmith tonight, Modern Times tomorrow, and 826 Valencia on Monday for that snake-charmer of the English......

Never having been huge fans of instrumental music, we were taken by surprise when we listened to Maserati's latest record Inventions For The New Season. Their own entertaining bio describes the music as a "post-psychedelic orgy of hooks molesting the tired cliche of math-prog" and/or "a post-disco drone machine bristling with the buzz-saw sound of 1,000 angry square waves nestled on a California king size bed of shoegaze swirl." We like to think of the......