A few dozen supporters showed up for Saturday’s decidedly unironic “March for Billionaires” protest, which was evenly matched by several members of the press and a group of activists one-upping the sympathizers with a satirical “March for Trillionaires” rally.

As Mission Local reports, a small contingent of billionaire supporters, who claim they’re not actually billionaires themselves, held a “March for Billionaires” protest at Alta Plaza Park in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights Saturday morning. Naturally, the event drew a crowd of onlookers, including several journalists and about a dozen animated protestors dressed in formal wear, proclaiming they were taking part in a “March for Trillioinaires,” per Broke-Ass Stuart on Instagram.

As SFist reported earlier this week, many assumed the original march was some sort of joke, but the organizers confirmed their intention was to spread awareness about their grievances against the billionaire tax. Per the LA Times, the pro-billionaire crowd thinks Californians should be grateful for the billionaires who hoard their fortunes here.

“We must not judge billionaires as a class but by their individual merits,” said organizer Derik Kauffman Saturday, per the Times. “There are good billionaires and bad billionaires, just like there are good people and bad people. California is extraordinarily lucky that this is where people come to start companies and build fortunes and we should do our best to keep it that way.”

As the Chronicle reports, about a dozen nearby counter-protestors dressed to the nines — including a Mr. Monopoly lookalike and a couple nicknamed “Oli Garch” and “Trilly O’Naire,” per the Times, held signs with messages such as “Let them eat cake” and “Defund the poor,” per the Chronicle. Per Broke-Ass Stuart, one participant sported a chef’s hat and bushy mustache while hoisting a stuffed “Chef Bourgeoisie” puppet into the air.

Meanwhile, the pro-billionaire participants boasted signs with messages, such as, “We *heart* you Jeffrey Bezos,” per Mission Local, and “Gains from trade,” per the Chronicle.

“I would say we were horrified that they’ve been talking about taxing billionaires to pay for Medicaid, to pay for hunger prevention, to pay for kids’ education. That is not a good use of my money,” quipped a counter-protestor, per the Chronicle. “You want to know a good use of my money? I’ve got this other island I’m looking at.”

Per Mission Local, a pro-billionaire protestor named Annie provided some choice quotes, including the notion that journalists should be eliminated.

“It is the intention of journalists to lie, which is why we need to not do anything to the journalists themselves, but we need to simply remove them as a class,” said Annie, per Mission Local. “Just like Germany does to the extremist organizations.”

And of course, the poors are “just jealous.” “People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,” said Annie, per Mission Local. “We are beautiful. We’re smart. We’re strong… We are supporting the billionaires, here.”

Artist Razelle Swimmer, the counter-protestor who brought the Chef Bourgeoisie puppet, pointed out the absurdity of the pro-billionaire stance to the Chronicle. “There are people literally on the streets that don’t have anything to eat in the place where we’re ending this march,” said Swimmer, referring to the Civic Center area.

“It’s sad,” Swimmer said, per the Chronicle. “They represent a group of Americans who still believe in this concept that if you just pull yourself hard enough by your bootstraps, you’ll have $8 billion.”

Image: Our Revolution/Threads

Previously: A ‘Pro-Billionaire’ March and Rally Is Coming to SF Saturday, and Apparently This Is Not a Joke

A satirical ad campaign from some as-yet-unidentified pranksters/performance artists has spent real money on multiple billboards in San Francisco and New York that satirize some of the "stop hiring humans" messaging of actual AI startups.

Replacement.AI appeared on the internet, and on billboards, in the last couple of weeks, with a website, a LinkedIn profile, a YouTube channel, and an Xitter account, the latter of which has been posting troll-y messages and retweets since September 25.

One example: "AI can now tell people how to build bioweapons.  However, we have made our users pinky promise that they won’t use our AI model for nefarious purposes.  Let’s hope they keep their promise!"

Two billboards went up in SF's Castro neighborhood sometime last week or the week before, as first reported by KRON4, one of which is advertising Replacement.AI's fake product, amusingly named HUMBERT — after the notorious pedophile narrator of Lolita. The text of the billboard, which shows a childlike drawing of a child in bed, with some menacing robot arms reaching out from under the bed, says, "AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her. Don’t worry. It’s totally legal."

The second billboard atop the same building (where Bar 49 sits at 16th and Market), addresses artists, saying, "Thank you artists for donating your life's work to our AI. Your generosity hasn't gone unnoticed. Just uncompensated lmao."

A similar billboard appeared in late September in New York's Times Square, and another billboard has gone up on SF's Lombard Street.

The fake company's website has some even more incendiary taglines on it, which are nonetheless evocative of things many of us have already seen on billboards along 101 driving into and out of San Francisco, from real AI startups pitching how their product can replace costly humans.

"Humans no longer necessary," says the landing page of Replacement.AI's website. "Stupid. Smelly. Squishy. It's time for a machine solution."

And the top testimonial-style quote they have on the site is a real one from OpenAI's Sam Altman, saying, "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies."

Replacement.AI also has a couple videos on its YouTube account, one from purported one-named CEO Dan, and the other from Director of Replacement Faith. "While working for 12 years as the Director of HR for a multinational, Faith realized that firing people gave her an almost-spiritual high," says the bio for Faith.

If we had to guess, these would be our two prankster performers. Anyone recognize them?

We'll let you know if we learn more about who's behind this fairly elaborate, satirical stunt.

In the meantime, "Don't despair." AI is coming for all of us. "I hope you've got savings!" as Dan says.

• Governor Newsom announced the launch of a new homeless response task force Friday, which will focus on state property along roadways in the state’s ten largest cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose, Long Beach, Anaheim, Bakersfield, and Fresno. [KQED]
• Vallejo police shot a man suspected of vandalizing a vehicle on the 2000 block of Ascot Parkway around 6:01 pm Friday; several agencies are investigating the shooting. [KRON4]

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

San Francisco author Kate Folk is releasing a new book, Sky Daddy, which deals with the taboo subject of objectophilia set against the backdrop of SFO and Silicon Valley. The main character, an online content moderator, gets her thrills via AirTrain rides around SFO, fantasizing about encounters with aircraft.

KQED notes that Sky Daddy balances dark humor with an empathetic look at objectophila, an obsessive-compulsive disorder in which someone forms a romantic or sexual attraction to inanimate objects, such as buildings, vehicles, or furniture.

Its unique premise, as detailed by Kirkus Reviews, provides a deeper look into a rare mental health disorder and how it intersects with the under-appreciated job of online content moderation, in which underpaid workers are exposed to relentless traumatic online content.

Sky Daddy is scheduled for release on April 8 through Random House.

Update: This post was revised to include information about objectophilia.

Image: Good Reads

Beloved humor site and “America’s Finest News Source” The Onion has been sold to San Francisco resident and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, who says “The Onion is an institution, a national treasure, and we need it.”

The new satire site The Onion actually used to have its own San Francisco print edition from 2005 to 2009, competing with the likes of the SF Weekly and SF Bay Guardian. That print edition died the same death as those two alt-weeklies, but earlier. And The Onion is becoming, in one small way, a San Francisco publication again, as Variety reports that The Onion has been sold to Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, who just happens to be a San Francisco resident.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“The Onion is an institution, a national treasure, and we need it,” Lawson said on Twitter after the deal closed. “But its success is based on something different than most media companies. The Onion has been stifled, along with most of the Internet, by byzantine cookie dialogs, paywalls, bizarro belly fat ads, and clickbait content. And we’ve had enough. The Internet sucks, and it’s time we made it better. It’s time to focus on customers – end users – again.”

He then promptly asked readers to donate $1, linking to an Onion post entitled Give Us $1 Or ‘The Onion’ Disappears Forever.

Lawson is not technically the sole owner of The Onion. The site will now be owned by a parent company called Global Tetrahedron, which is a fake running-joke company that’s long been used as a gag line in Onion articles. The newly-formed real version of Global Tetrahedron bought The Onion from G/O Media, the conglomerate that bought and handled (or mishandled, as many would say) the former Gawker media sites Deadspin, Jezebel, and Lifehacker, all of which they have since sold off.

Former NBC News reporter Ben Collins takes over as The Onion’s new CEO. On Thursday, Collins tweeted, “We’re keeping the entire staff, bringing back The Onion News Network, and share the wealth with staff. Basically, we’re going to let them do whatever they want. Get excited.”

Related: The Onion Suggests San Francisco Should Just Move Out Of San Francisco Already [SFist]

Image via The Onion

Conservative cancel culture lost its latest fight at Stanford, as a law student will now be allowed to graduate after posting a very funny satirical flyer linking a right-wing group to the Capital insurrection.  

The funny thing about "cancel culture" critics is that they are constantly trying to cancel people or things themselves. The chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” during the Jan. 6 Capital insurrection sure seemed like cancel culture, as did the attempt to "cancel" the certification of Biden’s victory that day via violent riots. And the current Republican civil war to oust any remaining Trump critics certainly smells like cancelling to me.

It was those very events that inspired a Stanford Law Student to post a very funny satirical flyer to a law school email listserv on January 25, a few weeks after the riot. The mock flyer purported to be from the hard-right Federalist Society, which does have a chapter at Stanford, and it promoted an obviously fake January 6 event called “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.” The very butthurt members of the Federalist Society demanded an investigation, and the prankster student Nicholas Wallace learned on May 27 that Stanford was investigating him and put a hold on his diploma over the complaint.

The flyer itself is hilarrrrious, and we will intersperse bits of it throughout this post. It advertises a Jan. 6 event (which was 3 weeks past when it was posted), and proclaims that “Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,” and “The first thirty students to RSVP will receive a $10 GrubHub coupon to be used on the day of the event.”

In on-point mimickry of the Federalist Society’s consistently pompous language, the flyer continues, “Please join the Stanford Federalist Society as we welcome Senator Joshua Hawley and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to discuss violent insurrection. Violent insurrection, often known as doing a coup, is a classical system of installing a government. Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.” (It also depicts fist-waving Senator Josh Hawley, himself a Stanford legal grad and campus Federalist Society alum.)

The college Republicans were not amused, and demanded an investigation and that Wallace’s diploma be put on hold. “Wallace defamed the student group, its officers, Senator Josh Hawley, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,” they complained, in documents obtained by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “Wallace, impersonating the Stanford Federalist Society, wrote on the flyer that ‘Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,’ insinuating that the student group was encouraging and hosting a riot. He also wrote that Attorney General Paxton advocates for ‘overturn[ing] the results of a free and fair election’ by ‘calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol.’ And he wrote that Senator Hawley believes that violent insurrections are justified.”

Wallace got Slate to write up his plight on Wednesday, and within hours, Stanford dropped the investigations. “In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent,” a university spokesperson told the New York Times. “The complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible, and the respondent and complainant have been informed that case law supports that the email is protected speech.”

So, the kid will graduate, and will be able to take the bar exam this summer (without the degree, he could not have). One Stanford Law prof just posted the supposed contents of a letter from Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez saying that “No one in the Stanford Law School administration had any role in placing the graduation hold, and we were shocked when we learned about it. I would never have approved such a thing.” So the case is now an administrative hot potato, with everyone involved eager to avoid further bad publicity.

And if the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society doesn’t like the outcome…  hey, there's always violent insurrection.

Related: Following Backlash and Lawsuits From Athletes, Stanford Decides Not to Cut Any Sports [SFist]

Top Image: Stanford.edu

"Swipe right to parenthood with Adoptly, the world’s first adoption app," declared a highly suspicious pitch to SFist last week. Vaguely outraged at the illegal-sounding idea of adopting children through an app that billed itself as Tinder for, like, kids or whatever, we didn't write about their Kickstarter, but now we are, because that was suspended. They emailed to say that had happened, and that they were now on Indiegogo. That, too was suspended. What's going on here?

The Verge called Adoptly indistinguishable from parody, questioning whether the company's employees were in fact real. We hoped, for all our sakes, that Adoptly was a hoax — and we still do. Ideas this crazy and odd usually turn out to be: Recall Qoopy, for instance, a parody of startup that proposed an Airbnb for chicken coops "launching" in Park Slope, Brooklyn and Bernal Heights, SF. Oh and remember Peeple, the short-lived (though ostensibly real) Yelp for People?

But then there's murkier territory, occupied by the likes of Pooper, which claimed to be Uber but for someone picking up your dog's poop. As that supposed company said in a statement "From the start we planned on a marketing first approach with the app as a way to build the brand and showcase the tech," which is to say it wasn't a parody, but it wasn't exactly real, yet either.

Adoptly appears to be a Pooper, or else at least longer con or joke than Qoopy. Even though the idea has been greeted with skepticism and outrage, Adoptly told Fox News "there’s been a widespread misunderstanding and [we've] insisted that there is nothing illegitimate or sardonic about the app."

Even if it isn't "sardonic," Adoptly isn't quite legit. “The concept is absolutely real, what we’re proposing is real,” Alex Nawrocki of Adoptly told Digital Trends. “But only through proper support and getting funding can we make this an actual reality." I'm relieved to hear the market, and hopefully laws, too, will decide this one.

"To be honest, we’ve been totally shocked by this unexpected turn of events,” Nawrocki, who is either easily shocked or still kidding, added to Digital Trends. “We feel it’s really unfair that KS would take down a legitimate idea, like Adoptly, just because some media outlets were debating it’s validity or felt uncomfortable with such an innovative and disruptive idea. Furthermore, we are really disappointed in [Kickstarter] for not reaching out to us beforehand. It was really distressing because there wasn’t any due process in taking our account down — just a very basic email notification.”

So, you're saying this ad is for real? Really.

Update: "Adoptly" isn't "a Pooper" it's THE Pooper: The same hoax artist creators, whose names I won't even mention here because their work is so bad and dumb, made it to ask facile questions about technology. As they write, their work "satirizes our tech obsessed world and our cultural desire to make everything faster, easier, more convenient, and instantly gratifying, and raise questions about where we draw the line, or whether we do at all." That's, like, deep, if you're incredibly shallow and dumb.

Our intention was not to in anyway attack or belittle those working in the adoption industry, or parents looking to adopt. The decision to present adoption in a Tinder-like format was purely meant as a jarring affront to everyday tech-users, and not as an assault on the adoption industry itself. Of the few positive reactions to the app, we did hear that although Adoptly may not be an elegant solution, the goal of modernizing and networking more agencies to improve adoption rates is a good one. Some folks also mentioned that anything that gets people talking about adoption and thinking about its issues is ultimately helpful, as it shines a light on area that doesn’t get nearly enough attention and support.

Related: 'Pooper,' An App To Send Someone To Pick Up After Your Dog, Is Bullsh**

Big takes on These Disruptive Times seem better suited to multimilliondollar, VC-funded, vanity-project sites than to the pages of SFist, but I'll tell you this: if no one can tell if your startup is satire or real, either you're screwed or we all are.

I'm saying this today in reference to Trashday.co, a startup that apparently claims that you will "never take the trash out again." So, what did they do, find a way to convert garbage into water? Fabric? Artisan pickles? Nope! Assuming that they are serious, their model is built around moving your trash cans for you, for between $32-$52 a month, depending on the number of bins you have.

People who are much smarter than I am, like Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, apparently believe that Trashday.co is the real deal:

And, who knows, maybe it is a real startup! After all, Recology, which is the company that picks up your trash, has been offering ALMOST EXACTLY THAT SAME SERVICE for "years and years," a rep told me over the phone this morning.

It's "very popular" with people who cannot otherwise take out their trash, "people who are disabled, out-of-town, things like that," she said.

If your trash cans are easily accessible, Recology's service can actually be significantly cheaper than Trashday's. If the Recology workers don't have to contend with any stairs, and if they only need to drag your cans 25 feet or less, all they add to your bill every month is a $27.10 "key fee," no matter how many bins you have. That's $13.55 for a key for the folks who get your recycling and trash, and $13.55 for the folks who get your compost.

If the Recology folks have to deal with stairs, you're billed an additional monthly $10.06 per cart, and if they have to take your cans over 25 feet, you're paying an additional monthly $9.28 per cart. So if you have a lot of cans that have to travel 30 feet and up and down stairs, Trashday could be a bargain.

That is, if it exists and you live in Trashday's "Launch Neighborhoods Noe Valley, The Castro, The Lower Haight and The Mission." (Says the Recology rep to whom I spoke today, "of course we [offer trashcan moving service] all over San Francisco! Why wouldn't we?")

But then again, as Business Insider's Matt Weinberger puts it, "we can't rule out the possibility that it's a big joke."

After all, Trashday only offers a phone number (415-209-5724) as a means of contact. When called, all you get is Google Voice's outgoing message, not one specific to Trashday.co or even one that says "GOT YOU SUCKERS." (Needless to say, SFist hasn't gotten a response to our calls to Trashday at publication time.)

Their website is privately registered, so that's no help — when I looked it up I was halfway expecting to see contact info for Chicken John or something. No dice.

So is Trashday real, or not? It doesn't seem funny enough to be a joke, especially since it's an imitation of a service that already exists. But it doesn't seem together or professional enough to be serious, either. So, I dunno? What do you think?

Update: SFist commenter Kevin Montgomery notes that the Trashday website's privacy page:

says the owner is "Tap and Hold, Inc." That company has another app on the App Store called NOW (which seems like a shitty Periscope rip-off--seems like their thing!): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id964353220

Tap and Hold is in the CA Secretary of State's business database, registered this January to Joseph R. Mellin. Here he is on Quora.

If this is a hoax, he's gone to great lengths to make it seem legit.

Let's see if Trashday is Joe's baby! I've dropped him a line on his Facebook page to find out.

There was a time when people sneered at the idea that people would consider renting their homes to unsupervised strangers. And who would have taken a ride in some rando's car a couple years ago, especially a rando who demands a fist bump? But here we are a few years into the Age of the Sharing Economy (it's no Aquarius, but what is?), most of us having Airbnbed on one side or the other, as we ride in pink-mustachioed cars to our possible doom.

SFist pal Susie Cagle hopped ahead of the curve, visualizing "new start-up opportunities in this 'new' economy," including Sickr (as seen above) and "Chore Children" (tagline: "They have so much free time!"). You can see all her Sharing 2.0 concepts here, but before you snicker, remember that there's a dude who's making $50 a night on DogVaycay. This shit is happening.

[Medium]

Bothered and bewildered Senator Leland Yee and optimistic Chinatown gang leader Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow appeared in a segment called “Innocent Until … Who Are We Kidding?” on The Daily Show Tuesday night. And if you must appear on the show, this is the segment in which you do not want to be featured.

“Trying to stop gun trafficking while trafficking guns. That’s what’s known in the business as a win-win!” silver-streaked satirist Jon Stewart says of Yee. Stweart then goes in for Chow, mocking, "Ohhh, Shrimp Boy! What are you going to do, make us dip you in the cocktail sauce?" [Yee begins at 2:30 mark]

What a mess.

The segment also features New York state Assemblyman William Scarborough and Charlotte Mayor Patrick Cannon, two other disgraced elected officials.

[Daily Show]
[SFGate]

Matt Werner, author and tech writer at Google, has had unbridled success with the advent of Oakland Unseen, a popular parody Tumblr billed as Oakland's answer to The Onion. Last Friday, Werner released the first-ever print edition of Oakland Unseen. On the dawn of his publication's physical manifestation (don't worry, fans, his work can and will still be found online!), SFist asked Werner five questions about his leap to print. And more.

1. Why did you decide to go to print?

Matt Werner: I decided to go to print because just over a month ago, the story Jack White Flight: Hipsters Fleeing Oakland in Record Numbers went viral. It got over 25,000 hits in under a week, which is a lot for a fake news site about Oakland (which has a population of 400,000).

I saw that the audience for these satirical pieces about life in the East Bay wasn't restricted to local journalists and those blogging about city politics, but that mainstream readers were also interested in these fake news stories.

And why I decided to do print in addition to the online version is because working with the print medium, you're able to do things that you can't online. For example, I'm proud of pages 2 and 3 that Greg Frazier did the layout for. We were about to fill a map of Oakland and a map of the Bay Area with news briefs, and cram in a ton of stories on the 12"x22" paper (24"x22" across the spread) that we couldn't as easily do online. Also, a number of the pieces play off each other, and having a print version, we're able to group the top stories around Local Politics, Sports, Oakland Tourism, and create separate sections for each.

2. How do you come up with your story ideas?

There's no real science to it. I try to write for 2-3 hours 5 days a week. I'm not writing exclusively for Oakland Unseen, but just whatever I'm interested in writing about outside of work. I covered a number of local news stories for Oakland Local over the last couple years, and I've written two books on Oakland and the Bay Area in the past two years. But my last project (Bay Area Underground) and my next project (a play set around September 11th in San Francisco) are very serious projects, and I wanted to do something lighter in between.

Oakland Unseen is a collection of the "unseen" or unheard stories in Oakland. I like The Onion's pieces, but many of them seem to have an East Coast or Midwest bias. So I thought up last October before the 2012 elections, what if The Onion had an Oakland bureau? What would that look like? And I started posting satirical news articles to OaklandUnseen.tumblr.com.

As for the writing process, I come up with most ideas based on observations about life in Oakland, and some people email their ideas into oaklandunseen@gmail.com. I have a small committee that vets the ideas and pieces before they go out so that they're not mean-spirited, but that they're shedding light on an issue in Oakland in a funny or creative way.

So, for example, I haven't been to Burning Man, but I know enough people who've gone from the Bay Area and heard their stories about Burning Man, that I wrote a few fictional pieces about the event. I ran them by my Burner friends before publishing to get their feedback — saying that I don't want to insult the Burner community, but kind of poke fun at the absurdity of the event (from an outsider's perspective) and the stereotypes associated with the event. I incorporated their constructive feedback, and ran pieces like "With Burners Gone, Oakland Residents Have One of the Most Productive Weeks in Recent Memory."

We don't want to laugh at people, but to laugh with them. There's a lot of absurdity in Oakland and the greater Bay Area, that sometimes people reply on Twitter asking if a story is actually true. When I ran "Powerful Vegan Lobby Leads Crusade Against SFO Being Renamed Milk Airport," people replied asking who runs this vegan lobby, and how is it so powerful? And why are they against SFO being renamed after Harvey Milk? I've clearly marked that this is all fake news.

If I have any hesitation with an article, I'll sit on it and run it by a number of people to get their reactions and responses before running or pulling the piece.

3. Who, in print/online, are your comedic inspirations/influences?

This is my first real attempt at comedic writing outside of my first book Papers for the Suppression of Reality, which could be termed "postmodern" or "academic humor."

I interned and volunteered at McSweeney's Publishing for 5 years in the Mission District, so McSweeney's has had a big influence over my writing style. As for Oakland Unseen in particular, The Onion, Daily Show, and Colbert Report — specifically Stephen Colbert's 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner Address are the closest direct influences.

Other publications that I draw inspiration from are the online sites: Scoopertino, The Pan-Arabia Enquirer, and Kickstriker, and the classic print publications Army Man and Might Magazine.

4. Do you plan an Unseen for San Francisco? Or better yet, Orinda?

I don't currently plan an Unseen edition for San Francisco, although I have plenty of ideas — or better yet — Marin County is just a rife target for satire. Dana Carvey has a brilliant standup routine about Prius-driving Marin parents, and there is plenty of material to do a similar publication on San Francisco or Marin, but right now I don't think I'm the right person to do it because what I know best is Oakland and Berkeley.

And because so much of the media in the Bay Area is focused on San Francisco, I purposely left much of my SF fake news coverage out of the print version of Oakland Unseen, to show that there's also a lot happening on the East Bay, and that if there's this much fake news about the East Bay — there are plenty more real news stories on the East Bay that aren't currently being covered by the mainstream media. I'm just scratching the surface.

5. Anything else you want to tell our readers?

Oakland Unseen is an attempt to show the lighter side of life in Oakland. So much media coverage about Oakland just focuses on the violence and robberies in the city. I'm not denying that Oakland has a high crime rate, but crime isn't the only story about Oakland. In my piece "SF Chronicle Criticized for Publishing Too Much Positive Press about Oakland," and throughout the paper, I offer alternate story lines about Oakland.

Also, I was the editor of the project, and Joe Sciarrillo is the publisher under Thought Publishing, Susie Cagle drew seven drawings in the paper, including the hipster drawing on the front page and the 4 fake "Visit Oakland" tourist t-shirts. Greg Frazier did the design and layout. We also had anonymous submissions from Oakland residents.

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Cashing in on the Osama death craze, local pet retailer Best in Show sent out the following mass email this morning. "Osama bin Laden is dead... but Osama Bone Laden is alive and well and living at Best in Show. And he's quickly becoming a collector's item along with out other Bony Babies dog toys." Adorable and timely, yes? The satirical plush play toy has already garnered rave reviews. "My little shih-tzu loves chewing on his Osama Bone Laden doll," said noted civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. (Or not.) To get your own terrorist doll, visit bestinshowsf.com.

Myth, Militarism + Man Boy Love -- say what? The "Asians Art Museum" have taken quite the piss out of the museum that bears the same name but without the surreptitious "s." Satirical phrases that pepper the front page, such as, "where more than seven centuries of martial rule are reduced to a single Disney-like trope of gentleman-warrior myth," "Better Ceramics through Slavery," "Let the gleam of naked swordblades transport you to a time when samurai used them to slice noses off of an estimated 38,000 victims," and "Say 'Konnichiwa' to Samurai Soft Power," have us wishing this were a real museum. Eyes on Blogs has gotten the scoop that Ernie from 8Asians is interviewing the creators of the Asians Art Museum today, so keep an eye out for it. Update: The interview is up! [Via 8Asians, Eyes on Blogs]