In cyberspace, "trolling" is when someone posts a deliberately controversial comment, not because they really wanted to say it but because they wanted to provoke an angry, emotional response from strangers -- kind of the online equivalent of insulting someone's girlfriend in a bar, or heckling a comedian, or snapping your towel at someone in the locker room. So let's see what we have here: a mob of bicyclists, roving unpredictably and ignoring traffic......

Okay, before you ask, this is not the much-beloved Our Locals On Reality TV Project Runway recap, this is the SFist Symphony review -- we'll explain later in the post. We had a little San Francisco Polyphony of our own on our way to the SF Symphony concert yesterday night to see Gyorgy Ligeti's shimmerily-dissonant orchestral piece of the same name -- the driver of our MUNI bus finally got fed up with people sneaking......

Over the weekend we went to Casanova's and realized that hipster beards have achieved some sort of critical mass. It appeared that every fourth person in the bar had some sort of beard, giving the bar a high HBQ (Hipster Beard Quotient, a stat derived by dividing the number of beards per customer, multiplying it by the size of the crowd, and then dividing it again by the square footage). The HBQ was not quite Boogaloos high but high nevertheless. We also noticed that there were also a high variety of beards seen, meaning that the beard craze has gone from it's "classic" phase to "gothic" phase....

There are two events of interest to Muni this weekend: Critical Mass tonight at 6, and Supercross Saturday at one of the baseball parks. Both events are dedicated to the elimination of automobiles, but only one will actually accomplish its goal, while the other will just be a noisy, irritating echo chamber. Muni will be running extra trains to accommodate the Supercross crowd. The extra trains will stop running at 10pm, which is a......

Everyone's behaving a little bit funny this weekend, and it's throwing the city's transit into a tizzy. An absolute tizzy! We haven't been this tizzied in MONTHS. First, there's Critical Mass. Lots of people firmly believe that something is be gained by proving that bicyclists are just as capable of causing gridlock and frustration as motorists, and they'll be doing just that ... um ... yesterday. Sorry about the late notice. Then there's a pilgrimage......

So, the horrible ordeal of Halloween has passed us by, and we escaped more or less unmolested except for Kenny the fire-juggling clown; but SOME PEOPLE just will not let it drop. "It was so hard to see busloads of police marching through an empty Castro," says one Castro resident, and another adds, "I was in tears last night." The buzzword for the evening seems to be "martial law," which is technically two words,......

Critcal Mass Halloween photos...

It’s a classic example of fixie bike lust: the carefully accented color coordination, expensive but mismatched wheels, improbably narrow handlebars, and, of course, lack of any unsightly “extras” such as gears and brakes. But wait...is that a basket we see? We love – and love to hate – those slim fixie kids. In our fair city -- and, apparently, in every other city and town on the globe (our friend just back from Budapest......

Critical Mass bike ride turns 15 years old today...

Wired Magazine has an interesting feature piece on what we believe to be one of those "only in San Francisco" kinda businesses: a mechanic who not only specializes in hybrids, but attempts to run a green garage. ...

And now for another big city's mildly retarded view of San Francisco: Too much ink has been spilled and too much bandwidth used to praise/bury Critical Mass in length. Now the LA Times gets in on the action. We'd love to break it down for you, but it's a long article and we don't bike or drive; more or less, it's stuff you've heard before. So, we present to you some choice quotes from......

On Saturday, the roads of west Marin and southern Sonoma counties were rife with those two-wheel vermin known as cyclists. Nearly 2500 of them. No, Critical Mass didn't make a drunken wrong turn on Friday night. This was an impressive gathering of the tribes known as the Marin Century.

Oh lord, what's to be done with these people? It's every week with the loud speakers in Dolores Park, blasting devotional music and testimony and dogma and so forth. You can hear them from blocks away. They're not there to persuade anyone; like Critical Mass or Dore Alley, these aggressive displays of difference just reinforce the gulf of "we're totally unlike you," rather than adopting the shrewd Scientology approach of "hey, look, this is......

Huge thanks to Dapper Dan J for sending along his pix of tonight's Zombie/Bike mob! Dan reports a smaller CM crowd than usual, maybe due to the weather: It sure was a scene downtown on Friday afternoon. We left our house around six (meaning that we missed the big > pillowfight), but got down to Market and Sansome in time for the first of the zombies to lurch past. Honestly, we've never really seen......

Tomorrow is registration day for the 2007 North American Courier Championships, or NABCCC. The extra C, we think, is for "combustible," because, hey, isn't tomorrow also Critical Mass? And hey, didn't we hear that bike couriers and Critical Mass can sometimes have an uneasy relationship? And wait a minute -- isn't that the exact same day that they're planning a zombie flashmob downtown, in the same neighborhood that CM usually rides, and a few blocks......

Can no force stand up to power of Critical Mass? Willie Brown was no match for the monster .. but Willie didn't have a WALKING HORDE OF UNDEAD. Preliminary reports from local Zomboligists predict some sort of catyclismic corpse animation coming this Friday, the 25th, around 6pm. And by terrible, horrible, incredibly accidental coincidence, that's exactly the same time that an army of revenge-seeking bicyclists will take the the city's streets. Epic battle is......

LAist is experimenting with blogging dates from J-Date, but finds the best men are found offline. Some date vicariously online and that is one reason why porn is big -- really freaking big -- so they ask if they should cover XXX since the heart of it lays in the city's San Fernando Valley. A writer grapples with her food porn photography obsession, another gets censored on Flickr, one gets scooped by the LA......

Our friends to the south have come under some uncomfortable scrutiny lately for all the toxic junk they dump into landfills. Greenpeace in particular has been pretty critical of Apple's use of mercury and poisonous fire retardants -- substances from which other computer companies have been moving away. Well, good news, greenies: Apple is oh so gradually cleaning up its act. Goodbye, lead! Goodbye, arsenic! Goodbye, decabromodiphenyl ether (coincidentally, our drag name)! In a......

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us. ...

Whether you love Critical Mass or hate it, the folks on the other side of the debate must seem totally baffling, if not downright evil. Its detractors wonder, "how can anyone support an event with no organizers, no pre-determined route, no agenda, and in which everyone has a different reason for participating?" Its advocates wonder, "in a transit first city, how can anyone oppose a method of transportation that's cleaner, safer, less wasteful, and......

Subbing in for SFist Jon this weekend! --No problems with Critical Mass yesterday -- but let's see what Matier and Ross come up with over the next few weeks, though. --Golden State wins again! NO WAY. GSW lead the series 2-1. --There's a new GavinWatch video: Virtual Question Time. We like the magic fairy dust sound effects! --Beth Spotswood gives Gavin a hug! OOO. --Adventures in Urban Living reports in from the T-Third trenches.......

Photos from San Francisco's Critical Mass, April 2007...

We hope we've worked you into a frenzy with all these free passes to SF Int'l Film Fest movies this weekend! Here's our last set -- after this, you're on your own to catch all the fantastic films they're screening from now until May 10. (Don't forget to check back at SFist for our reviews of the movies too.) Want to check out some film this Sunday afternoon? The Unforeseen, a documentary set in one......

This Friday will be Critical Mass and everybody is curious to see what happens, not the least of which is the Mayor who supposedly has a lot riding on it (see, riding, get it? Get it? We made a pun!). We are told that if things go wrong, it could reflect poorly on the Mayor as it will show that he is unable to control simple things like several hundred anarchist bikers out loose on the streets. Hey, wouldn't that discussion only encourage bikers? You know, like a biker would start thinking "hey, if I scare some poor, unsuspecting family from Walnut Creek, Gavin's approval rating could go down to 60%." ...

Sorry for the delay in reading your alt-weeklies this week; there was a comical mixup in our attempts to implement the weekly switchoff between us and SFist Sarah L. We'll try again in a few weeks, and we also briefly considered just not doing something this week, and then we thought, Oh no -- what about the YTD count? Everyone in December will say "that only adds up to 51!". So here we are! Last......

We still have no idea what exactly a "fixie" bike is (and at this point, we think we're having a better time imagining what one looks like than just walking out to Ritual Coffee and seeing one for ourselves), but we know they're destroying San Francisco bike culture -- just like Matier and Ross! The boys follow up their sensationalistic "Critical Mass attacks children" article from earlier this week to relate the tale of......

Here's todays roundup of news items...

Day II after the Critical Mass incident, we're seeing the bikers weigh in with their version of what happened and also some thoughts on the matter from Gavin. We're also seeing a lot of hate out there thrown in every direction as the war between bikers and car drivers is one of the hottest of hot button issues in this city. ...

Hey kids, remember Critical Mass? Did you know it still happens? Why, we haven't heard that much of them since the Great Bicycle Uprising in 1997 when they (or the police) staged a mini-riot after His Willieness tried to crack down on them. Today, they're back in the news as a new story of wild behavior is making the rounds. The story comes from today's Matier & Ross and to make a long story short, a nice, typical mini-van owning, suburban family was out in the city celebrating a birthday and got caught right smack-dab in the middle of Critical Mass. According to the story, it quickly devolved into Bikers Gone Wild. ...

SFist Jon's away this week, so you're stuck with the former editor on your Day Around The Bay. --Robert Haaland comes clean about his vacation during the District 6 race. --Critical Mass in Walnut Creek last Friday didn't go so well. --In some kind of strange shout-out to the golden spike that connected the transcontinental railroad, a bunch of people in Palo Alto signed a wireless Internet transmitter that had been painted gold. Huh.......