You have, well, two entire days to fill out and return your application to become a torchbearer for the San Francisco leg of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay. The San Francisco relay -- which is entitled, dear Christ, "A Sustainable Journey" -- is the only North American stop on the Olympic Torch Relay, which will make the sporty flame's U.S. visit that more special to us in the Bay Area. Or not. In......

Researching San Francisco history means spending way too much time sitting in the dark. In the library, we mean, staring at microfilm of old newspapers. Hours of scanning those scratched and blurry archives makes us a little punchy, so we blinked and rubbed our eyes at this gruesome headline from the February 13, 1902 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. We wondered momentarily if it was a prescient comment on the state of contemporary......

Lace up those Converse and get ready to scratch those chins, Radiohead fans. They're coming to San Francisco! When? No clue. Where? We can only assume the Empire Plush Room, of course. But the fine folks over at SF Weekly's All Shook Down just got word that everyone's favorite band to claim that they love will be making a San Francisco pitstop during the leg of their North American tour. Eee! While this Oxfordshire......

If you have ever wondered what the SFist staff is listening to, wonder no more. In no particular order, we are listing each staffer's favorite album and song from 2007. We think you'll be surprised at our wide variety of music affections. Here's the list: Christopher Rogers: Song of the Year: ARTIST: LCD Soundsystem SONG: North American Scum ALBUM: Sound Of Silver Album of the Year: ARTIST: Shellac ALBUM: Excellent Italian Greyhound Take the jump......

Degrassi: The Next Generation is known for it accurate, yet sometimes vanilla portrayal of North American teenage life. Topics such as date rape, teen pregnancy, school violence, and inevitable cocaine abuse by wayward rockers are all fair game on this Canadian after-school-special-like teenage sitcom. Characters such as Manny, the school slut, Paige, the pig-faced "mean girl," and Marco, the Latino gay resonate with tweens and adults alike. One of the most unforgettable Degrassi characters is......

Among San Francisco’s myriad neighborhoods, few are as widely misunderstood as the Outer Sunset. Location certainly plays a role. To your average Upper Haight resident – to say nothing of your average South of Market or North Beach resident – this beach-adjacent community may seem as distant as Honolulu, with an N-Judah trip that may rival a flight to Oahu in terms of travel time. But it’s sometimes easy to forget that San Francisco is a mere seven miles wide, and that the folks out west do have phone numbers that begin with 415, rather than 808....

--Carnaval went well! --Jack Daly for mayor! Quote of the day: "Daddy, this party is no fun. Let's go to another party." Don't all the progressives say that? Bonus tidbit: Sarah Daly says there is no way Chris is running. --Fanime convention video. --What's going on with that Real Foods abandoned space on 24th Street? --Those whales finally got out of Sacramento and into the Bay Area (and are thus now fair game for......

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......

J.D. Power and Associates, the well-regarded surveyor of customer satisfaction rankings and similar, has conducted its 2007 North American Airport Satisfaction Index Study. Guess which U.S. airport ranked the lowest in the large airport (those with 30 million passengers+/annum) category? Yeah, it's San Francisco International. ...

SFist Mihi goes Cantopop! The North American debut of Heavenly Kings for the SF Int'l Film Festival premiered at the Castro Theatre Friday night and it must have been a sweet moment for Berkeley-born, Bay Area-raised, local boy Daniel Wu who directed and stars in the movie. After graduating from the University of Oregon, Daniel stumbled into modeling and acting gigs while backpacking through Asia and became a bona fide heart-throb in China. Heavenly......

We've got a killer North American premiere and a Tony Award-winning play with its Tony Award-winning actresses--we've even got some sketch comedy from New York. ...

We won't say the Democrats are confident right now, but we hear Nancy Pelosi is already asking her staff to refer to her only as Madame Speaker, Ms. Speaker if you're nasty. Democrats are so confident these days that Kos himself weighed in yesterday to say that everyone is getting too confident. Hell, Democrats are so confident these days that they're starting to wonder if Nancy being in charge is really such a great idea. ...

Sampaist is on the scene in São Paulo beginning this week to become the only ist south of the Equator. Editor Leandro M. Pinto leads the paulistanos down there. You can protest someone at his office, sure, but when the whistle blows at the end of the day can you follow him home? D.C. has sports fans, apparently, and elephants aren't really cut out for zoos. There's this trick where you can read information from......

The opening night screening of a film festival is like having sex with a celebrity -- the experience itself is never that impressive, but it makes for a fun memory and it's nice to be able to say that you did it. Such was our feeling at last night's opening of the San Francisco International Film Festival, which kicked off with the North American premiere of Perhaps Love. The marathon began with San Francisco......

The Korean movie Rules of Dating, made its North American premiere at the Castro on Friday night. What appears at first to be a light-hearted romantic comedy about a libidinous school teacher vainly pursuing the student teacher in his charge quickly takes on a much darker tone when you throw in work place sexual harassment and what amounts to one of those, "hmmm we think that was pretty much a rape scene" moments into......

Our holiday horn of plenty continues to ejaculate forth yummy gift goodies -- this time, you've got a shot at winning a DVD of "Zatch Bell," a new (for US audiences) anime series, released for North American consumption by San Francisco's own Viz Media. What works well in Japan sometimes doesn't exactly translate over here. "Zatch Bell" passed its hundred-episode mark overseas, but it's made a much more modest splash stateside. The story concerns......

What an ambient summer week it's been and it's very likely to continue through the weekend. In fact, turkey wings crossed it will extend clear through the Thanksgiving weekend food coma. What do we owe this warm air, absence of damp Pacific winds and non-chilly evenings to? A giant high (pressure that is) holding court over the massive expanse of the Great Basin Desert (aka Nevada) which is pushing warm inland air over the western......

Bummer to all Friday evening outdoor outings. Ocean breezes pummeled the coast like we haven't seen since, uh, way back in uh, fog season all the way back in August. Fog and wind! What the fark? It's already October, our second and last month of summer ... Hello ... McCoy? Of course it turns out that yes, we still live in coastal Nor Cal and we're at the mercy of the Pacific Ocean's weather......

Hey, a fight in the Tenderloin that doesn't involve Supervisor Chris Daly? Singer and Angry British Man Ian Brown, the former lead singer of the Stone Roses ("I Wanna Be Adored" -- yeah, we had to look it up too, we always got all those Manchester bands mixed up) was arrested after getting in a fight with an audience member at his show last night at the Great American Music Hall. Brown, on a North American tour to promote his new album Solarized (hey, how come that's spelled with a z and not an s like the British usually do?), had just stopped playing "Made of Stone" for the third time to complain about the venue's sound quality, when, as our eyewitness source reports, "a Gary Busey Jr. lookalike security guard" jumped on stage and rugby-tackled Brown. The band rushed in for a fight, "stomped on" Gary Busey's head for awhile, and then left the stage, only to come back 15 minutes later and finish the show without further incident (if you don't count more complaining about the sound, that is). SFPD came by after the show and arrested Brown at his hotel. Brown's management says today that no one's pressing charges (yet) -- but it seems like they must have issued that statement before the criminal courts actually opened today. (Pesky time difference!) Brown was previously arrested in 1998 for an air rage incident (where he threatened to chop a stewardess's hands off for gesturing at him) and served four months in prison. Picture of fight from NME.com by Ben Taylor. And big ups to our confidential source! Hey -- do you have any good gossip? Tell us!...