If there's anybody in the city taking more heat than Mike Nolan, it's his quarterback, Alex Smith. Smith stands accused by the Faithful of not very being good. The evidence? Overthrowing Receivers. Underthrowing Receivers. Not seeing open Receivers. The numbers back up the evidence-- he has a preposterously low QB rating (57.2) and completion percentage (48.7). He is also 11-19 as a starting QB. In the games we've watched, Smith looked like the same QB he was when he first started-- skittish and inaccurate-- so much so, the Faithful are muttering that Smith, as a #1 draft pick, has been a bust of Lucy Pinder-like proportions (sort of NSFW-y). ...

Londonist got the big scoop of the week with what may be the first images of notorious street artist Banksy in action. They also got on a runaway train without an operator provoking a response from the transport authorities. Elsewhere, London's answer to Central Station is about to open for business, and Londonist got a sneak preview. Meanwhile, spooky goings-on beneath London Bridge, where a cache of skeletons provided an apt story for Hallowe'en.......

Do you have any information? A Fremont family is trying to get some answers about the circumstances of their father's mysterious death. The father suffered a heart attack at Van Ness and Market on June 5, and died five days later without ever regaining consciousness. The mystery is that they cannot find the car their father drove into the city that day. They have a garage parking ticket they found in his pocket, but it......

God bless the Bay Area Reporter. In this week's issue, Ed Walsh reports that former JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect and one-time possible kiddie porn connoisseur, John Mark Karr, "had sought gender reassignment surgery, not because of any driving desire to become a woman, but to help him avoid capture by police." That seems a bit drastic if you're not actually a woman inside, yes? Fascinating, but drastic. In lieu of Anne Frank-esque hiding or......

There are no less than three fantastic music festivals all taking place over the weekend of September 14-16. What gives? And how do we choose? Since we live in the bay area, perhaps our decision has been made for us: we're heading to the inaugural Treasure Island Music Festival presented by the fine folks at Noise Pop and Another Planet. The two day festival features 14 bands each day on two stages with mostly hip......

Royals 2 A's 1- So who is this Jack Cust and where the hell did he come from? He's from New Jersey and was drafted in '97 by the Dbacks. He then went from Arizona to Colorado to Baltimore and to San Diego and his only major accomplishment in the bigs up until this past week was tripping on the basepaths during a rundown when he was on the Orioles. All along, he was known......

Here's todays sports wrap up....

Baseball is a long season and there are a lot of games during the season and it is always problematic to overemphasize the importance of just one game, but all things considering, yesterday was the most recent Most Important Game of the Year for the Giants. They were 2 1/2 back against the Padres, four in back of the Dodgers and another loss just might have set them back too much. So in steps Matt Cain, your new Giants ace, to throw an eight-inning shut out of the Rockies. ...

SFist interviews Marco Panella from Dark Side of the Cop...

SFist interviews Matt Nathanson...

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.

Money Magazine has published its annual list of "Best places to live" in these here United States, with the highest ranking Bay Area city coming at number 31. While we've never visited the winning city of Fort Collins, Colorado, we have read that Thomas Frank book, and we're highly skeptical that Overland Park, Kansas (#6) is somewhere we'd like to call home. And weather wimps that we are, Boise, Idaho (#8) and Eden Prairie, Minnesota......

Dear Giants, It's over. Finished. Kapoot. As of this moment, we will no longer start to believe in you. Once again, for like the umpteenth and hundredth time, we started to think that you had turned the corner. That you had figured it all out, had put it all together and were about to go on the Big Run. You know, the run where you win like twenty out of twenty-five games and put the distance between you and the rest of the mediocrities that you run with in your division. ...

SFist As fans' loss is our personal gain, as SFist Jake's brief hiatus gives us leave to post on yesterday's sixth-inning infield brawl at Anaheim! We love a good baseball fight. That's because the very first baseball game we ever watched was the one where Nolan Ryan put that dude who rushed the mound in a headlock and pounded the crap out of him. Ah, memories. Anyways, we have no idea what's going on in the season or anything that happened in the game last night beyond what we saw on the news last night (Chavvy hit a homer, As won), but we can tellyou that in the sixth, As catcher Jason Kendall, up at bat, thought Angels pitcher John Lackey was taunting him about getting intentionally beaned for walks, and ran straight at him. Two Angels grabbed Kendall, who nevertheless managed to take Lackey down before both teams raced onto the field, for our slo-mo TiVo delight. Video here. This is the first bench-clearer for the As since 1993 in Milwaukee (while the Angels got in their last big fight in 2002 against San Diego, in spring training.) This is Kendall's second time charging the mound, too -- in 2004, Kendall went after (now-teammate -- awkward!) Joe Kennedy when Kennedy was at Colorado and Kendall was with Pittsburg. Did any of that even make sense? Don't worry, folks, SFist Jake will be back soon. ...

Few things go together better than baseball and dogs – no, not the kind that contain pig snout and esophagus and cost $4.50, but the canine type. And every summer The San Francisco Giants host the Dog Days of Summer where canines are admitted to watch the game from the outfield bleachers. The tradition continues with the 10th Annual Dog Days of Summer on August 5th against the Colorado Rockies. But the competition hardly......

Let us put this bluntly: The last season of "The Amazing Race" sucky, suck, sucked. They never left the continent, the tasks were as exciting as watching paint dry (and we believe that was, indeed, one of the tasks), and the whole "family edition" idea just blew. The show is at its best when the race involves flying from one part of the world to another, not when bickering families have to drive from......

Red state on blue state violence! The conservative Colorado-based group Focus on the Family (the guys who came out against SpongeBob Squarepants) has announced that it's withdrawing all its money from Wells Fargo banks because the SF-based bank gave $50,000 to GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination), solely off of profits made in the San Francisco area. You knew that $2 ATM surcharge fee was going someplace! Focus on the Family says it can't keep their money at a place that gives money to an organization that pledges to use funds to "fight the anti-gay industry," and has immediately withdrawn the $145 million it's stashed in the bank. Wells Fargo responds, "We absolutely made a $50,000 grant to GLAAD, and we're absolutely proud of our support for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community." Wells Fargo also notes, though, that the donation was not specifically earmarked for fighting the anti-gay industry. Last year, Wells Fargo gave $2 million to gay and lesbian organizations. ...

This was our first time at the Li'l Roxie, and we hope it won't be our last! (Please, please, say the rumors aren't true!) We squeezed past the teeny-tiny hallway and into a long, narrow, but spacious, comfy, and well-proportioned closet, and settled into our squeaky chair (we apologize to all our neighbors) for 90 minutes of SF DocFest electoral rage. We also picked up a ballot on our way in -- before you ask, it was an IndieFest optical scan, where choices (or "ratings") are marked with a circle. Call It Democracy, by Matt Kohn, is an exploration of the problem of electioneering in the 21st century -- from the oddities of the electoral college to Supreme Court shenanigans to missing electronic ballots to Colorado's electoral-vote splitting movement in 2004. Okay, we're not too liberaler-than-thou to admit it -- electoral reform is really not the most interesting topic in the world to us. So it's with a great deal of relief that we can report that this movie is not like one of those long DailyKos tinhat-wearing posts that you skip, or a long filmstrip with blue states and red states, or anything like that. The clips are interesting! The movie moves at a brisk pace! We didn't find ourselves trying to gouge our eyes out with a stick! That's good, right? Cameos by stapler-throwers John Bolton and Kevin Shelley, after the jump. ...

Let's just come right out and say it: the Giants, now 8-10, had a crappy week. They went two-and-five against teams that, even without Barry Bonds (whose return is still shrouded in steroid-enhanced mystery) and Moises Alou (who returned to action on Friday night and hit his first homerun as a Giant on Sunday), they should have won at least four games. Until this point, the Giants' offense had been the bright spot of the......

Having recuperated from a recent bout of baseball-related mathematiasis, SFist comes to you this fine Monday afternoon from sunny Denver bearing a first-hand report of yesterday's Giants/Rockies finale at Coors Field, along with a look back at the Giants' performance in past week and a peek ahead at the week to come. The story so far for this year, with the Giants leading the Majors with .305 team batting average but languishing at 15th in......

4389 Barry Bonds-less...

Three girls go into the woods. They get drunk, they get naked, they get high. Do you think they might get dead? Wilderness Survival for Girls takes all the tension of a well-done teens in peril thriller and then turns it on its head to awesome effect. Ruthie (the smart but spazzy one), Deb (the snotty, uptight one) and Katie (the bad girl) go up to Ruthie's family's cabin in the Colorado mountains to celebrate......

Suck it, Angelinos! San Francisco beat your city yet again in the super-important Men's Fitness"Fattest and Fittest Cities" list. While both SF and LA were on the "Fittest" list, our fine city was close to the best at #4, while the City of Angels was a mere, pitiful #21. San Jose whupped up on those sloths down south as well, coming in at #17. Oakland eked out bragging rights over LA too, coming at at......

What an ignominious weekend for Bay Area baseball. Saturday, 2 October 2004 will long be remembered as a dark day for Northern California baseball fans. After a big win over LA on Friday night, the Giants' bullpen collapsed as dramatically as any Dodgers fan could ever hope on Saturday afternoon, leaving the team's fate in the hands of the pathetic Colorado Rockies, who got swept by the red hot Astros in Houston this weekend. When......