'New York Times’ amends boba tea story after reader outcry https://t.co/jtA6E4wgSz pic.twitter.com/DOdDA5IRW4

— Eater (@Eater) August 17, 2017

An article in the New York Times this week about SF-based Boba Guys and their popular new New York City location, since edited, made the faux pas of "discovering" boba tea as if it were some brand new invention, with the original title of the piece "The Blobs in Your Tea? They’re Supposed to Be There." After an outcry from readers who are better informed than the article's writer, the Times issued an apology Thursday, saying, "In retrospect, we wish we had approached the topic differently (if at all). There may be a story in the expansion of bubble tea businesses in the United States, but there is no denying the drink has been around for quite a while."

Bubble tea has been around in Taiwan since the 1980s and began trending in major cities in the US a decade and a half ago, if not a full two decades ago. It's just that the Business section at the Times wasn't consulting the paper's own Food section, which wrote a piece just this past December titled "Bubble Tea? So 2002. A Sampling of Food-Trend Predictions."

As Eater NY points out, "hundreds of bubble tea shops dot the five boroughs, with companies like Boba Guys putting a trendier spin on the drink, serving it in Mason jars with organic ingredients as of late." They also note the "subtly ignorant parts to the [original] story, [which have since been edited,] like calling this Asian drink 'exotic' and 'curious' when it has been in the country and beyond for upwards of 30 years."

But this is hardly anything new for the Times — as Quartz reports, the paper Gawker used to call The Grey Lady "discovered" banh mi in 2009, ramen in 2004, and Korean food, generally, in 1999.

Andrew Chau, co-founder of Boba Guys (six years ago), tells Eater SF, “I do think it was a genuine mistake. When we talked to them for our comments, we walked them through the industry, flavors, and backgrounds. They definitely had the intention of understanding what we do." He continues, "On the one hand, we don’t want writers to stop writing about ramen, pho, sushi, or other ethnic foods that the mainstream culture thinks is ‘exotic.’ But on the other hand, journalists have to develop more empathy and write from a more immersive and holistic perspective. Otherwise, we start objectifying culture. It becomes tone deaf in times when tone is everything."

So when it comes to calling out fake news, this would be a legitimate case, and the Times has owned up to it. Perhaps business writer Joanne Kaufman needs to get out more.

The #thirst is real! 👅 #sundayswag

A post shared by Moscow Mule (@the.moscow.mule) on May 21, 2017 at 10:06am PDT

It's a trend widely noted in the last half-decade at craft cocktail bars and otherwise regular bars that have tried to spruce themselves up with cocktail menus and bourbon flights and the like: the proliferation of copper mugs for Moscow Mules. But now a state health agency is calling into question whether they might be poisoning people, based on FDA guidelines on the use of copper vessels for serving food.

Once mostly just an old-timey gesture at Southern California bars like the now long-gone Cock 'n' Bull on LA's Sunset Strip — where legend has it the cocktail was invented — and Starlite in San Diego, copper mugs are now found all over the country as vessels for mules (both the Moscow and Kentucky varieties, and some others). But the Iowa state Alcoholic Beverages Division issued an advisory last week noting that the FDA's Model Food Code specifically prohibits copper or copper alloys from coming into contact with foods with a pH below 6.0, i.e. anything with fruit juice in it like the lime juice found in a Moscow Mule. Acidic liquids like vinegar, wine, or cocktails with fruit juice can cause copper in unlined mugs to leach into a drink, potentially leading to copper poisoning.

While there have not been widespread reports of such poisoning — which San Francisco's CBS 5 reports can cause stomach pains, diarrhea, vomiting, and yellowing of the skin — the advisory calls to question how many bars around the country have been serving the drinks in mugs made only of copper or copper alloy, without a lining made of something like stainless steel or nickel, which are harmless. Also, how has no one noted this part of the FDA code before with all the copper mugs everywhere?

The story goes that the Moscow Mule was dreamed up by a liquor distributor and a bar owner at the Cock 'n' Bull in the 1940's — the former, John Martin, owned Smirnoff Vodka and was having trouble selling it to American consumers, and the latter, Jack Morgan, had been making his own ginger beer as a side project and was having trouble selling it. Copper.org includes part of the legend that there was a third person involved, a woman with a stash of copper mugs she couldn't sell, and the drink came together with lime juice and their inspiration, made all the better because copper vessels help keep drinks cold.

The drink gave birth to a whole ad campaign by Smirnoff in the 1950s and 60s, including this ad featuring Woody Allen, helping popularize Russian vodka to gin-drinking Americans by way of the Moscow Mule.

Fast-forward to the late 2000s, when the craft cocktail craze began reviving all things vintage, and the explosion in popularity of ginger beer in bars over the last six or seven years — with Eater calling this "the golden age of American ginger beer" in 2015. Now copper mugs are available for cheap in every hipster housewares store.

I should note that the more expensive varieties of the mugs, like this $40 set on Amazon, tout the fact that they're made of "pure copper" and are "unlined."

The more you know...

Adults know well enough how depressing it can be to see your friends cavorting about some beautiful international locale on Facebook while you're stuck at work too poor to travel. And we've also been trying to navigate the new etiquette around when it's OK to check your phone during in-person conversations, and when we should stop playing games on our phones and go to bed. But put a smartphone in the hands of a teenager, and what you get are all of those dilemmas and then some, magnified and unchecked. As psychology professor Dr. Jeane M. Twenge writes in a well researched piece in The Atlantic — a piece that has been virally spreading like mad among parents on social media this week — the evidence is now clear that smartphones are creating "a lonely, dislocated generation" of teens who leave the house less, interact with each other less, get less sleep, and show an alarming rise in rates of depression and suicide.

"Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states," Twenge writes. "The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs." As she goes on to describe in the piece, which is actually excerpted from her forthcoming book iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us, the generation of kids born since 1995 are already exhibiting broad trends in isolation and depression, and immaturity, that are distinct from Millennials and all the generations that precede them. And in a series of graphs, Twenge links all of it to the release of the iPhone in 2007, when the oldest members of what she calls iGen were 12 years old.

Much of the data Twenge is relying upon comes from The Monitoring the Future survey, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and annually polls teenagers from across the country, asking them more than 1,000 questions about how they spend their leisure time, adding questions in recent years about how often they text or use social media. The survey has polled 12th-graders every year since 1975 and 8th- and 10th-graders since 1991. Twenge extrapolates the data from the survey to paint a picture of teens who are now content to mostly go out with their parents, spend long hours staring at their phones alone in their rooms, and spend less time dating or experimenting with drugs or alcohol than kids just five or ten years older than them did at their age.

Some major takeaways from the piece:

• Fewer 16-year-olds are rushing to get their license anymore, content to be dependent on their parents longer.
• 22 percent fewer high-school seniors have jobs in the 2010s compared to the 1970s.
• "Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds."
• "Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media."
• "As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves."
• "Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan."
• "For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it."
• "Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys."
• "Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock."
• "In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep."

It's a bleak picture, not to mention one that doesn't bode well for these kids as they reach adulthood. Twenge points out that a defining aspect of Generation X was the elongating of adolescence, with "Its members start[ing] becoming adults earlier and finish[ing] becoming adults later" than Boomers did. But as she surmises, iGen kids aren't even embracing the hallmarks of adolescence, except for the part about retreating into themselves and becoming emotional wrecks, largely thanks to their phone addictions.

The piece, and the forthcoming book, are sure to spark even more obnoxious harping from parents about "screen time," but these are also probably lessons that all of us could use, even if we aren't still teenagers ourselves.

Now go back to passive-aggressively liking things on Instagram that are actually eating you up inside with envy.

Related: UGH: The Average Person Is Going To Spend Five Years Of Their Life On Social Media

Millennials don't like staying home at night! That's the basic take-away from a new survey from a site called Bankrate and their fairly judgey-sounding Millennial blogger nicknamed The Cashelorette, and picked up by the San Francisco Business Times. According to the survey conducted last month, speaking to an undisclosed number of younger Millennials aged 21 to 26, 54 percent say they eat out "at least three times a week," and go out to a bar at least once a week. Add to that people's coffee habits, which among this group amounts to 30 percent buying brewed coffee from a retail outlet about three times a week.

Compare that to the average American who says they dine out only about once a week, as the Business Times notes. (And according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in February, that number may in fact be dropping.)

The Cashelorette translates this data about her age cohort to "we're spending a lot of money on vices," even though food from a restaurant shouldn't really be called a vice, and her overall set of tips is great in theory for people trying to save money, but there is more to life than eating pasta at home, and cooking anything elaborate can often cost you more in ingredients than grabbing a quick burrito or slice of pizza, particularly if you're shopping at Whole Foods or Bi-Rite.

And nightlife in American cities is suffering enough at the hands of lazy, Netflix-watching, Tindr-using Millennials without scolds like this 24-year-old blogger telling everyone to conserve their cash for later and live a more sober life!

So, keep on living your lives, I say. Support your city's restaurants and bars and interact with the world outside your phones! A third of you (in the Bay Area) are still living off your parents anyway. You can start saving money next year.

Related: Does Anyone Go Out Anymore?: San Francisco Nightlife In The Age Of Netflix And Chill
31.5% Of Bay Area Millennials Live With Their Parents

Crime overall in the city of San Francisco has been trending downward over the last year/year and a half, despite ongoing issues with property crime and car break-ins in multiple neighborhoods. But at a Police Commission meeting last week, newly-appointed Mission Police Station Captain Bill Griffin discussed the disturbing rise in homicides in the neighborhood so far this year — there have been three, with nine overall in 2016, and only two in 2015, as the Examiner reports.

Griffin says violent crime appears to be on the rise overall too, noting that it mostly seems connected to nightlife — he's referring, probably, to the fatal shooting on 19th Street in March in the vicinity of places like Bissap Baobab and Beauty Bar, and perhaps this New Year's Day shooting on Shotwell that happened just after 2 a.m., though it's unclear what else he's talking about. Here at SFist we've noted a couple of disturbing incidents in and around Dolores Park having nothing to do with nightlife, like this attack by a group of juveniles last week, and this early morning shooting in February.

It's not all bad news, however. Last year in the Mission, robberies dropped by 14 percent, rapes were down 22 percent, and aggravated assaults were up only slightly, from 572 in 2015 to 596 in 2016. Overall, violent crime was down five percent in the neighborhood year over year, but that may change for 2017.

As of March, looking at just the first couple months of the year, Hoodline reported that crime was trending downward in the central city, though the average number of crimes per month in the Mission was already trending upward. The same was true of the Castro, Duboce Triangle, and the Haight as well.

In the middle of last year, we looked at SF's overall plummeting crime rate, though even at the time, rape and homicide were tracking very similarly to 2015.

In 2016, Griffin told the Police Commission that the vast majority of calls received by the department were homeless-related issued, followed by mental health calls.

Previously: SF's Plummeting Crime Rate (Except For Homicides), By The Numbers

In case you needed another reason to stop by for lunch, RTM is swarming with Pokemon! #loveRTM #EatMorePork #PokemonGo #PokemonGoPhilly

A photo posted by Tommy DiNic's Pork & Beef (@tommydinics) on Jul 11, 2016 at 8:33am PDT

Certainly here in app-centric San Francisco, business owners don't want to be shown up by their East Coast brethren in the Pokémon Go customer-attraction race, right? Since the number of Pokemon Go users is basically exploding, and today's news blitz will only help that for the FOMO set, restaurant owners in major cities are likely seeing more customers wandering in and getting overly excited by people staring into their phones and catching a virtual creature, and subsequently buying something because they want to be polite, or they're just thirsty. Bon Appétit reports that savvy restaurant owners are already cashing in by purchasing "lure" modules that, for a period of time, attract ever rarer Pokémon to that location.

Atlanta-based digital agency Huge Atlanta's Derek Fridman tells BA that the company's retail coffeeshop has already attracted a bunch of new customers after he spent $49 to buy some virtual coins which he spent on a "lure."

Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia used Instagram earlier today, as shown above, to lure in lunch customers saying the place was just "swarming with Pokémon."

This is the same ploy that criminals were using to allegedly rob unknowing app users in St. Louis, but it's just innocent marketing when it's a business, right?

Business Insider picks up on the trend without apparently realizing that business owners can actually control whether a PokéStop in or near their business becomes a magnet for rare and powerful Pokémon, by spending a little cash.

And Curbed SF has provided a handy map of where to find various Pokémon across the city — which includes Brewcade (2200 Market Street), where you'll find Ponyta; the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, where you'll find Exeggcute; and right outside Chambers Eat + Drink at 601 Eddy Street, where you'll find Clefable.

Will this fad last more than this week? We'll see.

Just be warned all ye dorks who don't normally get this much exercise: Pokémon Go excitement has been linked to sore legs and, like, physical activity.

Previously: Pokemon Go App Can Access Your Email And Contacts On iPhones Posing Major Privacy Problem

In 2009, San Francisco's foremost Tiki bar looked about ready for a condo conversion. That was then, and this is now: Currently, the Tonga Room & Hurricane bar at the Fairmont Hotel expects its best year in decades, with Melissa Farrar, the hotel's director of marketing communications, telling the Chronicle that she projects the bar's 2016 revenue to be double what it was in 2011.

Opened in 1945, the Tonga Room surfed on the Polynesian pop wave. As kitsch connoisseurs know, the bar was conceived of by an MGM set designer in what was presumably a post World War II Pacific Theater fever dream. It hasn't changed much — except for an update to its drinks and a plug from Anthony Bourdain — since then. But like the intermittent indoor "rainstorms" over the bar's artificially blue lagoon, arriving like clockwork and then drying up, kitsch culture appears to have returned, right on schedule.

Examples abound: Outside of Tonga, but also in the Tiki category, there's the expansive and fanciful Pagan Idol, brought to us not by tiki geeks but instead by the Future Bars hipsters behind Bourbon & Branch. In a Union Square space that's reportedly struggled to draw crowds, its several rooms of island flotsam and jetsam are generally packed, while its own indoor storms heighten the atmosphere.

Smuggler's Cove, a contemporary Tiki temple that's been one of San Francisco's most decorated bars for some years, recently doubled down on dreamy kitsch creativity with a spin-off: the gin-soaked London-grunge Whitechapel. Inside, you'll find yourself in a would-be abandoned underground stop where, apparently, Jules Verne has been drinking G&Ts.

Most recently, in reviewing the new Leo's Oyster Bar, the Weekly's Peter Kane give us another example. While "slightly less over-the-top" than Whitechapel and Pagan Idol, which Kane namechecks, the space at Leo's, as designed by Ken Fulk, "looks like the lanai from a certain 1980s TV show about four older women cohabitating in Miami." Sounds pretty tacky and fun to me.

"With San Francisco flush with more cash than at any time in the last 15 years, we have an even more open embrace of opulence," Kane theorizes the trend. "This new aesthetic isn't afraid of kitsch or the repurposing of grandma taste (or mobster taste, or postwar suburban chic) as refinement." While this boom-and-bust town is still booming — for the expensive cocktail cool kids, anyway — bars are competing with increasingly large budgets for patrons. That's led to more themes and larger imaginative leaps (at least, when the money doesn't get squandered).

Meanwhile, as patrons spend more on cocktails, they're presumably working hard for that cocktail money in the first place. As they always have since the Don Draper days, kitschy bar experiences, in the form of elaborate decor and at the bottom of an umbrella drink, promise an escape from the workaday life behind the typewriter or laptop or, well, whatever comes next. Perhaps its no surprise when we hear that distant thunder from the loudspeakers. It looks like it's raining again in kitschy paradise.

Related: The 11 Best Spots For Classic Tiki Drinks In The Bay Area

In the popular imagination, hackers and coders subsist on Soylent alone. However, according to a trend piece over at KQED, a new beverage of choice is the source of strength for technologists in San Francisco. But new it isn't — In fact, it's an old favorite in Germany.

“If you’ve been to Berlin, Club Mate is everywhere,” Andy Isaacson, the cofounder of the "hackerpsace" Noisebridge, clues KQED in to the Yerba Mate beverage “It’s at every train station, every subway station, every falafel stand — [and] they’ve got falafel stands like the Mission has bacon-wrapped hot dog [stands].”

Isaacson first tried Club Mate, highly caffeinated but with less sugar than the likes of Red Bull or Monster, while in Berlin. "Six hours later, I realized it was 2 AM and I hadn’t yawned once,” he said. Club Mate as a company has had eschewed advertising, relying on grassroots popularization in the hacking community.

"It gives you that up, it helps your brain work better for a little while," says Isaacson, but "the flavor isn’t as syrupy as American soda. I find that it’s a smoother high. It doesn’t have as much of a kick and a drop as you get with soda like Coke or Jolt.”

Employees at German photo sharing app EyeEm, who opened a San Francisco bureau, are also a fan of the drink. Their Community Manager describes it as “like mate tea, but sweeter and really refreshing with ice.” But who else is drinking Club Mate? Is this on tap at Facebook HQ yet? And what happens when the coding set discovers something stronger... like hard drugs? I hear you can write a lot of code on hard drugs.

Stealing titles from both New York and Seattle, according to a new study we're "sleepless in San Francisco," which is the new "city that never sleeps."

Fortune and Health, working from data collected by also-ran search engine Bing, report that we in SF only get an average of 6 hours and 34 minutes per night. Let's not dwell on how Bing knows if you are sleeping, since it's easier to simply trust in the benevolence of our tech overlords protectors.

Instead, let's assume this is good data and ask how it could be possible? Our bars close embarrassingly early, and although sleep is the key to a healthier you, we're among the healthiest cities in the nation. So what gives?

The answers, I think you'll find, are obvious.

San Franciscans don't get much sleep because we have to wake up early to go on a hike, head to yoga, or get in an hour at the climbing gym. That's how we're up nice and early and that's what keeps us healthy. Let's not forget that the entire financial industry has to be up when the markets open on the East Coast, 6 a.m. our time. Another factor: We're an excellent coffee city.

By the same data, the town of Boston is predictably the sleepiest in the nation. Each night, Bostonians spend 8 hours and 7 minutes passed out drunk and dreaming of lives lived in real American cities.

Related: The Best Post-2 A.M. Eats In San Francisco

Remember how two years ago everyone was saying "the kids don't use Facebook anymore because it's uncool and their moms are on there?" Well, it turns out that isn't really the case, at least yet. According to old-school polling org Pew Research, who just did a new survey about the internet habits of teens, Facebook still dominates with 71 percent of kids 13 to 17 saying they use it. Sure, their social media attention spans have been spread thinner in recent years, and only 41 percent say it's their "most visited site." But it's still killing Twitter and Snapchat in terms of overall use.

As Re/Code points out, the second most used site/app is Instagram, with 52 percent reporting usage, and of course Facebook owns that too. So when it comes to penetrating the teen market, Facebook is still killing it — even if teens probably aren't using Facebook messenger for fear that their grandmother will see them on there and start sending messages in all caps.

And sadly for Twitter, they're on par with Google+, tying for fourth place with 33 percent of teens reporting using either.

24 percent of teens report going online "almost constantly" via a smartphone, and three quarters of teens overall either have or have access to a smartphone.

Back in 2013, partly via a few tech CEOs like Josh Miller of Branch who asked his 15-year-old sister if she used Facebook, the tech industry starting rumbling that Facebook could be doomed because they were losing the kids. But between the purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, they've held onto their market share pretty solidly it looks like — even though the last time Pew did this survey, which was via phone and therefore not completely comparable, they had 77 percent of teens using Facebook, so it's possible there's been a decline.

And perhaps Facebook's many privacy filter options — which teens can easily navigate and most adults are still trying to figure out — have helped to keep the kids using the site to share dick jokes with friends without their grandmother ever knowing.

Previously: Hope For Youngsters Renewed As Teens Grow Weary Of Facebook

Google has released their 2014 Year in Search, the 14th annual such list detailing the top searches of the year. Both nationwide and here in San Francisco, topics like Ebola, the World Cup, the iPhone 6, and Robin Williams' suicide topped the list. Other celebrity deaths like Joan Rivers', Maya Angelou's, and Philip Seymour Hoffman's were also popular searches. But the funniest part of the San Francisco lists are the "how-to" searches, because they feel the most specifically Bay Area.

Topping the topics local folk were wanting to know how to do? Macrame is number one. That's followed by "how to compost," "how to shuffle," and "how to whistle." Suprisingly, "how to hack" comes in all the way at number 6, right above "how to belay."

Above, Google's splashy Year in Search video, which is like a semi-sappy, extended Apple commercial, except for Google. Below, the full lists of SF's hot topics for the year.

Top 10 Trending Searches in San Francisco in 2014

• World Cup
• Robin Williams
• SF Giants
• iPhone 6
• Malaysia Airlines
• Philip Seymour Hoffman
• Ebola
• Joan Rivers
• Jennifer Lawrence
• Tracy Morgan

Top 10 News and Events for San Francisco in 2014

• World Cup
• Malaysia Airlines
• Outside Lands 2014
• NFL Draft
• World Series 2014
• Olympics
• ALS
• Coachella 2014
• Oscars 2014
• Ferguson

Top 10 'How To…' Questions for San Franciscans in 2014

• How to macrame
• How to compost
• How to shuffle
• How to whistle
• How to coupon
• How to hack
• How to belay
• How to bowl
• How to shave
• How to brew

Top 10 'What is…' Questions from San Franciscans in 2014

• What is ALS
• What is Ebola
• What is ISIS
• What is Bitcoin
• What is Alibaba
• What is MS
• What is Tinder
• What is Hamas
• What is Ello
• What is listeria

See also: Odd Google Searches That Trended in 2014 [NBC Bay Area]
Top Google food and drink trends of 2014: Budweiser and Margaritas dominate [Inside Scoop SF]

Just when we thought we had, as a city, reached peak food-truck-park saturation, plans have emerged for yet another food truck park, this one in the Mission on an empty lot where Valencia meets Cesar Chavez.

As Socketsite reports, it's supposed to be called Valencia Food Truck Park, and could accommodate up to seven trucks at a time. Also, it sits at the intersection of two bike routes, so there's that too.

Currently, as Eater notes, Tacos El Paisano has a cart at this same spot. But plans include repaving the whole thing and building a restroom structure, so the cart may have to move.

This news comes barely a month after we learned of another food truck park, the Duboce Truck Stop, headed for 55 Duboce.

Maybe, someday, we will look back on these food-truck-crazed times and laugh and laugh. Until then, enjoy that kimchi burrito.

You've heard about the food-hall trend, right? There's the Second Act Marketplace in the old Red Vic, which followed on 331 Cortland in Bernal, and just recently we've heard about The Market Hall coming to Mission Bay, Market on Market headed to the Twitter building, and an unnamed food hall concept coming to the Castro. Now Eater brings news that the long vacant Hollywood Billiards building at 1028 Market Street will become something that's just called The Hall, and will feature seven separate vendor areas, including five restaurants and a beer-and-wine bar from Anchor Brewery.

The restaurants include: Fine & Rare, a Southern-style seafood restaurant and raw bar with an attached wine shop from a former Bocadillos chef; The Whole Beast, the first brick-and-mortar for pop-up/catering chef John Fink, specializing in whole-animal cooking; Little Green Cyclo, a brick-and-mortar venture spawned from the Vietnamese food truck and catering company;
Raj + Singh, and Indian concept which will include vegetarian and vegan fare; and Cassia, a Moroccan-Peruvian fusion concept from the people behind the Fuki food truck.

Also, there will be a coffee-and-pastry spot called Dignitá, and Anchor Brewers and Distillers will be opening an onsite bar featuring Anchor-made beers and wine brands from their portfolio.

It's unclear if all this will be in the ground-floor spaces — formerly home to a strip club and a sex shop during the last decade — or if the second-floor billiard-hall space will be part of it as well.

They're aiming for a late-September opening, but that seems ambitious. Stay tuned.

Sidebar, this new concept is going in just down the street from the recently fire-damaged but still under-renovation Renoir Hotel, and that crazy huge new cultural center and mixed-use development at 950 Market.

[Eater]

The preferred terms, according to one techie interviewed by the Chronicle while working at a Four Barrel Coffee in the Mission, are: "hackers," "makers," or "coders." The dreaded t-word is not only insulting, says one tech venture fund partner, but it might as well be a racial slur.

Like the derogatory "hipster," the term "techie" is apparently only useful until someone turns it on you. For today's Gold Rush column, which is the local paper of record's occasional feature on how tech affects city life, the Chronicle used a highly scientific survey of people on laptops in popular coffee shops to gauge people's temperature on the term. They even tracked someone down to explain the linguistics behind this whole thing:

San Francisco State linguistics lecturer Jenny Lederer said the word "techie" may have started to pick up a set of inferences, which can make a benign, neutral word sound negative - so "techie," like how it's used in the song, may now conjure up ideas of gentrification and entitlement more than, for example, the terms "software engineer" or "tech worker" do.

Adding further insult, Lederer said: "The 'ie' suffix can sound belittling, like 'groupie' or 'yuppie.' The 'er' suffix in English is agentive, as in 'hacker,' thus sounds stronger."

Regarding the cool factor of the word "hacker," we direct your attention back to 1995, a time when even Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie weren't cool:

But what's more insidious says Enrique Landa, identified by the Chronicle as co-founder of Mission-based nerdwear company Cordarounds, is when the term is used to describe not only an industry, but newcomers to the city: "Whenever you get a mass migration of a new wave of people," Landa explained, "you get a negative connotation from the people who were there before - like Mexicans in the Mission. The new wave always gets a bad rap."

Update: An earlier version of this story named Enrique Landa as co-founder of Betabrand, as he was identified in the Chronicle. Betabrand CEO Chris Lindland follows up to say Enrique is not the co-founder of Betabrand, but that the two worked together to create a clothing brand four years earlier. Landa's LinkedIn profile lists Cordarounds — a company which later became Betabrand — among his experience. For his part, Lindland tells us via email: "I (and by extension, Betabrand) have zero interest in whether Techie is a pejorative term. Ranks a zero on the slur scale as I see it."

Previously: Willie Brown Has Some PR Advice For The Tech Industry; NYT Discovers The Tech Boom Backlash
[Chron]

In discretionary spending news, there's apparently a new trend afoot: sending your overweight "children" (which in San Francisco means cats and dogs) to pet gyms and enrolling them in diet and exercise programs.

As we all know, there are more dogs than children in the city, and all that pet love has its consequences: feeding Fluffy too much Fancy Feast. The solution? For some folks, it's spots like the Swimming Dog in Petaluma and Derty Dog Fitness, a dog gym in Santa Rosa that boasts canine-friendly treadmills and weight systems. The Chronicle reports that "big-boned" calico cat Cassie enrolled in a three-month pilot of Fetch Pet Care, a sort of Weight Watchers for pets that the Berkeley-based company plans to launch later this year.

Whither the pet obesity problem? According to the Association for Pet Obesity and Prevention, more than half of American dogs and cats are overweight. And of course San Francisco's private sector and innovation-minded start-ups are trying to solve the problem their way: if you want to keep better track of your child dog's fitness, there's always the Whistle, a $100 dog activity tracker that attaches to a dog's collar. Next up: Pet Fat Camp, the reality TV series (we hope).

[SFGate]