When SFist reader Matt Scully spotted this Department of Homeland Security device at New Montgomery and Mission, he had some questions. Is this thing — whatever it is — Super Bowl related? Is it a bomb sniffer? A radiation detector? Something else?

All great queries, to which I will add, how important can it be if it can easily be unplugged (and if it needs to run non-stop, why not get a battery or a generator)? And, hey, can I charge my phone there? Plug in my curling iron?

So, I started by calling San Francisco's local Department of Homeland Security bureau, which referred me to "Washington D.C. — there are about 20 sub-divisions of Homeland Security it might belong to, and each one has their own media person." OK! So I went to this page, and went down the line, calling every single department listed, talking to folks, and leaving voice mails.

Three hours later, I have exactly nothing to report. No one knew (or was saying) what these devices are. And then I looked at Matt's email to SFist again. Matt Scully, huh? Like Dana Scully, of The X-Files? Which is, in its new season (SPOILER) arguing that there wasn't a cover-up of alien activity on earth after all, and that all the alien abduction/experimentation during the show's earlier run was actually a government conspiracy hidden behind alien guff. Is this some aspiring Deep Throat's way of tipping us off to some nefarious Illuminati plot in our in our fair city? WHAT IS GOING ON GUYS?

Anyway, after placing more concurrent phone calls than I've made in ages, I am none the wiser. Is the truth out there? Reddit suggests it's an air sampler, but, you know, if I were trying to plant misinformation Reddit would probably be my first stop. Anyway! If you know what these things are, drop me a line, comment, or just send me a message in a pack of Morleys.

Why was San Francisco's city hall bathed in blue light this weekend? No one seems to know, which I guess means we are free to speculate! (See update below!)

The building's blue glow was first noted by Civic Center's Michael Strickland, who writes that "Though local government spends millions on press spokespersons and elaborate websites for every department, good luck trying to find out any current or useful information from either source."

My efforts were similarly fruitless. No one at 311 knew, referring me to the number for "City Hall Events." A voicemail left there has not been responded to.

Recalling that City Administrator Naomi Kelly was the spokesperson who addressed the extremely minor kerfuffle over City Hall's red and green look during Hanukkah, I tried her office, as well. An extremely pleasant and helpful person there checked with someone else and was told that "the dome defaults to teal." When I said that the blue light was an overall thing, not just the dome default, she said she'd have to look into the matter. I eagerly await her response!

City Hall's typically verbose twitter account has remained silent on the matter, as well.

So let's do some guessing! Was it lit up in honor of autism awareness, as it was in April 2011? Are they promoting yet another Smurfs movie? Was it an early acknowledgement of "Blue Monday"?

Another possibility is that City Hall was aping the city of Chicago, which urged all "downtown buildings to light up blue for King Week, January 11th thru 20th....We want all Chicago to go blue in his honor, and to call us all to be peacemakers," Chicago's Building Owners and Managers Association wrote earlier this month regarding the effort. Could City Hall be (silently, and solitarily) be following in the Windy City's footsteps?

Or, as Strickland writes, perhaps the color in intended to match the likely mood "newly re-elected Mayor Ed Lee, who can't seem to show up for a public event these days without being booed by protesters." Sure, could be that, too! Any ideas, guys?

Update 11:01 a.m.: Literally ONE MINUTE after this report was published, Bill Barnes of the city administrator's office called me. The reason city hall was blue (drumroll...)

"From time to time," Barnes says, "a company will rent out city hall for a private event. The event Saturday was for the company Fitbit, who as part of their contract asked that city hall be blue."

So there you go. Mystery solved, and it only took about two hours and four phone calls!

Related: Why Was City Hall Lit Up With Christmas Colors During Hanukkah?
Mayor Lee Shouted Off Stage By Protesters At MLK Day Event
Day Around The Bay: How Was Your 'Blue Monday'?

While today's news are filled with shocking crimes with awful details, they are as grisly and lurid as they were in the 19th century. Starting this Sunday, August 19, BBC America's intense new crime drama, COPPER, delves into the underworld of 1860s New York with Detective Kevin Corcoran examining the evil that lurks in Five Points and beyond. Today, through August 21, we're giving you a chance to exercise your skills of detection and win a new iPad (32GB) with Retina Display, a season pass to watch COPPER and a sweet reproduction 1864 NYC map, by solving an actual 19th century mystery—details below!

First of all, we have no idea what this is. On the surface, we have a kind of a nice 80's song with a weird Deborah Harry-meets-Phil Collins-meets-The Squeeze kind of thing going on. But it begs the question: Where did this come from?

Someone uploading all their homemade music videos to YouTube? Some art school kid's faux-retro video project? Is the tempo supposed to be getting increasingly faster until we start to feel nervous? All we have to go on is this reply to a youtube comment:

"That video is partly meant to counteract the negativity associated with those who jump from the bridge, as portrayed in the film "The Bridge". Bridget models joy and shows that life can be happy."

They're saying it's "not a mass grave" because it's only about 20 people, but still, a whole bunch of mysterious human remains were discovered just a few feet underground during an excavation underneath a historic building at Fort Mason. AsBay City News reports, more 19th century bones keep showing up since they found the first ones on Monday, along with buttons, pieces of bottles, and an intact bottle that reads "hair tonic." Yes, whoever one of these dead guys was, he was at least a little bit vain, and was buried with his styling product.

"These mysteries are more profound than we were expecting," says one of the archaeologists on site, and we think by "mysteries" he's referring to the cluster of remains and not the hair tonic. To clarify, there was no cemetery on this site, and it's going to take a fair amount of primary source sleuthing to figure out why there were a bunch of dead people buried here sometime between the 1850s and 1880s. Actually, we may never know.

After a kayaker found a skull in a cove below Battery Spencer on Monday in the Marin Headlands, authorities uncovered a partial skeleton, clothes, and jewelry. "After rappelling 600 feet down a cliff in heavy fog, crews recovered the intact skull, along with several upper body and torso bones," reports BCN (via KTVU). "They also found some clothes and a necklace, but the items were not gender-specific." Hmm.

2. The Incident Specific Preparedness Review team is finally done with its 112-page report regarding the first two weeks of response after the accident. You'll get a chance to read it before Super Bowl Sunday.

3. Restoration of the natural resources injured by the Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay will be the focus of two public meetings, on Tuesday, Jan. 22 in Oakland and on Tuesday, Jan. 29 in Mill Valley. Read all about it here.

4. Speaking of allisions, we had another one today with a 200 foot barge and a bridge in the North Bay. Apparently, these kinds of things happen all the time up there. Mmm.

5. The winner of the Cosco Busan Depature Contest was reader Fred Sharples with a guess that was off by a mere 17 minutes. His reward? SketchFest tickets. Natch. He'll get to see the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space with Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett from Mystery Science Theater 3000. A "cult classic with LIVE commentary" at the Castro Theatre at 9:00 PM.

Man, that Jamie Lynn Spears story is tremendous. Just stupendously tremendous. And you know, of course, that Mrs Spears, mother of Jamie Lynn and Britney, actually had a contract to write a book on parenting, right? The book, as you might expect, is on hold right now.

Warriors 111 Timberwolves 98- Golden State's Magical Mystery Tour rolled back up north to Minnesota where they rallied in the second half to win. And by rally, we mean outscoring the T'Wolves by 20 in the third quarter (37-17) after being down by 14 at half. The Warriors are now 14-5 with Jackson back in the fold and are 2-1 on their killer road trip. If they get out of this trip with a .500 record, everyone should be darn happy.

-Anyone seen that movie "Idiocracy?" It's pretty bad, but it's central premise is that civilization is not "evolving" but "devolving." The reason is because while all the well-educated, intelligent folks aren't having lots of kids because they're too busy with their careers and self-actualizing, all the dumb-ass redneck hillbillies are. In other words, the Spears family.

-There is kind of a fun essay in the New Republic by a Giants fan trying to make sense of the whole steroids mess by pondering good ole Marvin Bernard. The writer mentions that as a Giants fan, his favorite memory is a home game in 2000 against the Dodgers when Bernard hit a game-winning walk off home run in the ninth inning, a game we remember too. But now that Bernard's known as a juicer, is that moment tarnished in any way? After all, Bernard probably wouldn't have hit it if he wasn't cheating. Hell, he might not have even been playing if he wasn't cheating. What he's wondering is how are we supposed to feel about all these baseball memories we've enjoyed over the past ten years or so when we’re no longer sure what we saw was what we saw?

Well, we enjoyed it, anyways.

But brace yourselves for tonight's edition: an "honest" look at the (dying? dead? necessary?) state of print publishing. Such inky icons as Ben Fong-Torres (from Rolling Stone), Lynn Peril (publisher of Mystery Date), Audacia Ray (editor of $pread Magazine), Deborah Ross (contributor to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine), Kaya Oakes (poetry editor at Kitchen Sink Magazine), and Jimmy Chen (contributor at McSweeney's) will all read and maybe make an occasional outburst.

Drinking is strongly encouraged and enabled, but not necessary, but always fun if you do. The looking back to yesteryear goes from 7:30 to 9:30 at Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St. (at Mission); admission is $3-$5 on a sliding scale. (Aw, thanks.)

One more thing about tonight's Writers With Drinks: proceeds go to benefit Other Magazine, so drink the top-shelf stuff and loads of it. You didn't really need that liver, did you?

Well, it was no or Lost Boys, but we did get a few laughs out of The Thirst this week at the Another Hole in the Head Indiefest film festival. The Thirst thrust shy hippie college student, Will, directly into the battlefront of a neverending war between the vampires and their sentry slayers.

We’d spoil it by telling you just who the vampires and the slayers are, but suffice it to say they aren’t the only ones doing battle in this film. There’s also the underlying age-old conflict between some raucous, chauvinist frat boys and the ROTC/intellectual/crunchy kids. After seeing The Thirst with our friend, AG, we shared a couple beers and a couple more laughs.

AG: Hey, thanks for helping me kill (pun intended) an hour and a half of my life. Wow, that was one really good bad movie. The Thirst would have been an ideal choice for Mystery Science Theater 3000. I've just dated myself but for those of you who remember it, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

More of SFist Wendy and AG's conversation after the jump! Still from The Thirst, above.

We say almost only because the movie they did, which they kept secret until the night of the show, was the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling epic and all the comedic riffing in the world can't stop that movie from being at least a tad painful to sit through. Die hard RiffTrax fans might have also been a little disappointed by the fact that it's a movie that has already been given a RiffTrax, albeit one with only Mike Nelson commenting. (January's Daredevil presentation wasn't released as a RiffTrax until after the show.) We haven't listened to the original track so we aren't sure how much was changed with the addition of Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, but we'd imagine there had to be at least a few new jokes. And even if there weren't, a well-told joke can be listened to more than once--anyone who owns at least one "MST3K" DVD can tell you that. (We know we'll never get tired of hearing Robert Loggia talk about his frog terrarium in Over the Top.)

After the show, the guys sat down for a short Q&A with someone from Sketchfest, and while the questions he asked sounded awfully familiar, it was a nice addition to the show. The "riffers" even stuck around for a little while after that and braved the nerdy throngs to sign a few autographs and pose for some photos. They're such nice, mid-western boys!

If anyone went to Monday's show at Cobb's we'd love to hear about it. Let us know in the comments!

Hey, remember that interview that SFist Rain did with Mystery Science Theater 3000's Mike Nelson last week, about his new project, Rifftrax? Download an .mp3 of the MST3K folks and play it while watching its corresponding mainstream movie! GENIUS. Well, you can see Mike yourself at RiffTrax Live tonight -- they won't say what movie's going to be screening (all we've got is that the star has a Bacon number of 2), but January's commentary on was apparently awesome. 8 p.m., $25, Cobb's Comedy Club at 915 Columbus (x Lombard).

Other events:

--Honor America's fallen soldiers at the Memorial Day ceremony in the Presidio. Parade at 10:30 a.m. at the Presidio Main Parade ground, memorial service at the Presidio cemetary at 11 a.m.

--It's Porchlight story time again with Beth Lisick and Arline Klatte. This month's theme: food. Cafe du Nord (2170 Market, x 15th/Sanchez), 8 p.m., $12.

--Jazz and Indian dance at CounterPulse. 6 p.m., $18, 1310 Mission (x 9th).

--The Gnar-B-Cue fest at Mama Buzz Cafe -- various bands playing, plus bring your own meat/veg for the grill! 3-9 p.m, $5, 2318 Telegraph (x 23rd) in Oakland. Also, at 7 - free tarot card readings.

Mike Nelson with Mary Jo Pehl as Mariah in Glitter.

RiffTrax is Mike Nelson's clever venture which allows him (and frequent contributors Murphy and Corbett) to make fun of more current films (and TV shows) without having to deal with annoying copyright issues. Just purchase and download an MP3 of their movie commentary and then play it along with a DVD of the film. The wonders of modern technology!

We had a chance to talk with Mike Nelson about Rifftax, performing live and, of course, bad movies.

First off, thanks for once again doing some shows in our fair city. But we're wondering why you guys keep coming here. You're making other cities jealous! Do you have any other live shows planned? Perhaps a tour of some kind?

The guys at the SF SketchFest have been kind (or crazy) enough to invite us a couple of times. We did a live RiffTrax this winter and it worked out, so they asked us back. We get asked by other cities to do live shows but frankly, those other cities don’t provide as much sushi as does San Francisco. If they can pony up more sushi, we’ll consider it.

Since you're doing mainstream movies now, do you find it harder to just go see a movie these days without thinking about how it might fit into a RiffTrax, and constantly thinking up wisecracks in your head, (or perhaps out loud, to the delight of your fellow movie watchers)?

Yeah, I’m doomed to look at almost every movie as material. I watched The Hours not long ago and every tragic moment in it (of which there are dozens), I’m thinking, hm, that could be pretty funny… But no, I don’t do it out loud in a theater, even when movies deserve it, like, say, Déjà Vu.

Fan-created image of Mike "Aeon Flux" Nelson from the RiffTrax Web site.

In 1950, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the contemporaneous critical response to his stories and those of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, et. al. that:

It takes a very open mind indeed to look behind the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom.

We were reminded of Chandler's defensive tone on Saturday at the Palace of Fine Arts, where the Film Noir Foundation and LitQuake combined to present NoirQuake! (exclamation point sic.), "a hard-boiled afternon of noir readings and film clips." The museum-opening crowd, dotted with more fedoras than usual, assembled to sip chardonnay and hear local authors read from their favorite noirs. Chandler's come a long way, baby--these are exactly the kind of people who, 50 years ago, dismissed hard-boiled fiction as trashy, gaudy, and barely acceptable. They had fun Saturday, though; it was hard not to. Joe Gores read from Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Joyce Maynard read from Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, Barry Gifford read from Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Joe Loya read from W.R. Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle, Daniel Handler read from Patricia Highsmith's Strangers On A Train, Robert Mailer Anderson read from Cornell Woolrich's "Rear Window," Gary Phillips read from Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, Michelle Tea read from Jim Thompson's The Grifters, and Peter Plate read (more like declaimed, actually, from memory, sounding like a poetry slam--interesting choice) from Charles Willeford's Miami Blues. Each reading was followed by the same scene from the film adaptaion of the novel or story.

Although a program that starts with Hammett and Humphrey Bogart and ends with Willeford and Alec Baldwin tells a rather unpleasant story about U.S. culture and progress since the 40s, these books and movies are almost uniformly great. As if to drive home the point about how noir's cultural status has changed, M Is For Mystery bookstore was hawking the high-class Library of America collections of Chandler's and Hammett's work alongside The Life and Times of Sean Penn (Spicoli himself appeared later in the evening to talk about film noir).

To call it "the Bay Area's homage to 'Mystery Science Theatre 3000'" is to sell both TV shows short. We tuned in for 'Monster Island's' broadcast of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and were instantly charmed by host Vicki Vampyr (aka Kathy Moehring) who crooned seasonally appropriate jazz standards with a trio, all while dressed like Elvira's shyer, convent-educated sister. And as she sang "Walkin' In a Winter Wonderland," caustic commentary was provided by an elf. We weren't sure what he was more bitter about -- the winter wonderland walkers conspiring by the fire, or an eyeliner job Harriet Miers would have been proud to call her own -- but who cares? It's a heavily made-up elf heckling Christmas tunes sung by a vampire! Plus a crappy movie! Holiday entertainment doesn't get any better than this.

"Monster Island Theatre" is on every Thursday at 9 p.m. If you can find a way to record this while watching "My Name Is Earl" (or vice-versa), do it!

By SFist Lisa, contributing