Chatterbox

Three remarkably boring Web sites that mailed us press kits this week in hopes that we would write about them but will be sorely disappointed: "The Solution" site on starting your own business; Elder-Davis Inc.'s cremation site; and the U.S. Open Squash Championship site. ... Stop us if you've read this before: Writing about the San Francisco mayoral election in the Oct. 22 New York Times, B. Drummond Ayres Jr. expounds, "For all its beauty, charm, and laissez-faire approach to life, ethnicity, and doing one's own thing, San Francisco has most of the usual problems that beset other major American cities -- red ink, red tape, crime, unemployment, potholes, and struggling schools." ... Next to James Brown, Kevin Bacon is the hardest-working man in show business, and his ubiquity on the Hollywood marquee has spawned a new parlor game called Back to Bacon. To play, one need pick a fellow film actor (TV and stage actors are excluded) and name actors the chosen actor has performed with who have also starred with Bacon. To go from O.J. Simpson all the way Back to Bacon, we would say, "O.J. Simpson was in Naked Gun with Leslie Nielsen, who was in Airplane! with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was in Forget Paris with Meg Ryan (we can almost smell the bacon now!), who was in Sleepless in Seattle with Tom Hanks, which brings us Back to Bacon because Hanks starred with Bacon in Apollo 13." Obviously, players who are able to work out the (ouch!) leanest way Back to Bacon are the winners (and probably also desperately in need of a social life). ... Based on Chatterbox's experience late Saturday afternoon, San Franciscans should forget about finding a cab in the city during the hours that World Series games are played. ... Will the last staffer to leave the San Francisco Examiner Style section please turn off all the computers? Three more Exers just left the paper to join Salon, the on-line publication former Style honcho David Talbot and former Examiner Foreign Editor Andrew Ross are putting together. The departed staffers are TV critic Joyce Millman, feature writer/cyberspace columnist Scott Rosenberg, and egghead supreme Gary Kamiya.