Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

Thursday, the SF Symphony opens a two week Prokofiev festival. They even have a fancy title: Russian firebrand, Russian virtuoso: the music of Prokofiev. We think they're trying to say that Prokofiev was Russian. He wrote five Russian piano Russian concertos which will all be performed by four Russian soloists: Yefim Bronfman, Vladimir Feltsman, Ilya Yakushev (he'll do two), and Mikhail Rudy. That's a pretty rare opportunity to hear all these concertos performed in......

A few months ago, when we talked to Larry Young, the frontman of San Francisco-based comic book publisher AIT/Planet Lar, he pointed to Matt Silady's then-pending book, "The Homeless Channel," as one he was excited about. For good reason. The book's out. We read it. We quite enjoyed it. And now you can too -- we're giving away our review copy to a lucky SFist reader....

The always-reliable and smartly-snapping Drew Altizer stopped by the SF Film Society's red carpet awards ceremony on Saturday and passes along these views of the scene! Award recipients this year included: Robin Williams and Spike Lee (both of whom were eye-catchingly dressed and whose pictures are after the jump), and George Lucas, who's pictured above with Ron Howard and John Lasseter from Pixar. Thanks, Drew! Extra bonus: if you go through Drew's pictures on......

We don't know about where you are, but it seems like spring can't decide whether or not to happen. Some days are warm, some days are cold, and sometimes you aren't sure which. Baseball may have started up (and soccer/football winding down) but it still seems cold out there. Unless it's not. Anyways, onto the -ists....

Sofia Milos works the red carpet at the Golden Globes, wearing a dress that looks straight outta 1999. Praise Xenu! By SFist Elaine......

This week's offerings represent the Bay Area's diversity. If that's too PC for you, go for the ones with a touch of taboo....

Thursday night the Castro Theatre looked like a giant faculty meeting of humanities professors from some crunchy liberal arts university. But what can you expect from the West Coast premiere of a Robert Altman movie based on an old timey public radio show that originates in Minnesota of all places, don't cha know? A Prairie Home Companion closed the San Francisco International Film Festival Thursday night to a sell-out crowd. Despite the fact that......

Torontoist throws down the gauntlet and challenges all comers: pillow fight, bitch. They also stand up for a fellow blogger taking heat from the TTC and welcome city-wide WiFi. SFist can finally admit it: It's possible that Bary Bonds juiced. Is Bay Area artist (tempted to put quotes around that) Thomas Kinkaid "kinda crappy" or "explosively crappy" or does he just like marking territory? SFist wonders. Technology comes in the form of new Mac goodness......

The food blog world is aflutter over the biggest awards ceremony of the year. The Oscars? Don't be silly. It's all about the food, baby. The 2006 Independent Food Festival and Awards are open source awards, only with taste buds, not coding. And just as Firefox kicks Redmond's butt, the winners of these awards are worth seeking out. Some are national, some are local, all are good. Those golden statues barely got a mention in the food-o-sphere. Seemingly only Bruce Cole, editor of Edible San Francisco, deemed them worthy of talk and then only as a way to explain why you're better off cooking red meat than watching the red carpet. His technique sounds good, but would some pictures kill him? As long as we're in meatlandia, let's just go all out: Bacon for dinner! More meat (goat and crab), SFist Sam, and liquid nitrogen ice cream, after the jump. SFist Jacob, contributing...

Last week we got ourselves all worked into a lather about the SF Weekly's bizarrely incorrect Harmon Leon Infiltrator piece, though sadly it wasn't the kind of lather we usually like, with all the whipped cream and clothespins. A week(ly) later, we notice that the online version of the article has been quietly changed (though you gotta love the forgotten AVN reference in the right-hand corner), and the writer quietly fired. Why are we......

SFist usually experiences a frisson of excitement when we visit the Kabuki Theater, usually from the 38 that nearly hits us every time we cross Geary at Fillmore (apparently, red lights don't apply to busses). But this time our excitement wasn't the brush with death kind, it was the far more pleasant brush with celebrity type, as we were at the Kabuki to take in the red carpet arrival of several of the folks......

Covering the SFIFF this week, we've spent a lot of time in the Fillmore and in the Castro -- two places that are notoriously hard to get stuffed in for less than ten bucks. We should qualify that. We don't know if it's the Noe Valley effect that's inflating prices at shops around the Castro theater, Pat Robertson's theories about DINKs, or curious foreign tourists with their super-strong currencies that make it nearly impossible......

When we heard that Geoff Callan and Mike Shaw's project, "Pursuit of Equality," a documentary about San Francisco's 'Winter of Love,' was premiering at the San Francisco International, we were happy, as we've been waiting for months since the film's trailer went online (under the working title "Rush to the Civil Altar"). When we got the press release about the red carpet treatment for the film's stars, we figured there would be the added......

That's right, with all the crazy purchases, consolidation and boost in VC capital in the tech sector, a lot of folks are wondering if the boom is back. Of course, at SFist, this can only mean one thing -- a wave of BizDev and Marketing types who know nothing about tech flooding the city in another gold-rush disaster. Yeesh. Hopefully this time, the nerds can keep ahold of the reins, and keep pushing the......

Is Barbara Boxer getting ready to run for president in 2008? It kind of looks like it......