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Hey, Sean Parker, Listen to Your Handlers and Shut Your Yapper

The criticism leveled at Sean Parker for the lavish, Medieval-themed wedding he threw in a patch of old-growth redwood forest in Big Sur went a little overboard. The wedding, and the preparations for it, appear to have been a bit less scandalous than it at first seemed, when The Atlantic's Alexis Ma ... More >>

S.F. Ghost Scams Spread to New York City

Over the past few months, San Francisco law enforcement has tightened the screws on the ghost scams, in which teams of con artists steal elderly ladies' money by tricking them into thinking a spirit will kill a loved one. With the SFPD and the District Attorney's office locked-in on fighting the ... More >>

Twitter Fetishists Can't be Stopped

The horrific heaps of misinformation that spewed from Twitter and other social media services during the Boston Marathon bombing saga haven't slowed down the Twitter fetishists. If anything, they've doubled down. For some reason, these people believe that Twitter represents some kind of earth-shat ... More >>

Right-Wing Conspiracies Try to Wrest Media Shame Away From Broadcast, Twitter

From print to broadcast to online, there's very little the media's gotten right about this Boston tragedy before getting it wrong multiple times. The New York Post exaggerated the death toll from Monday's Boston Marathon bombings by 400 percent before joining InfoWars in misidentifying three diffe ... More >>

Twitter: A Rank Cauldron of Misinformation (And Some News)

When I worked for Cnet News.com during the late-'90s dot-com boom, there were many things that annoyed and perplexed me about the tech-news site. It was run by former newspaper guys. Because of that, the editors displayed a weird, very newspaper-like mix of sensationalism and prudishness. An edi ... More >>

Current TV Considering Sale

Another one bites the dust.Al Gore's San Francisco-based liberal media outlet, Current TV, may soon be up for sale.The network, which started life by catering to young liberals and crusading against global warming before filling its airwaves full of talking heads, may be ready to call it quits; or a ... More >>

SOPA, Limbaugh, Komen: This Is What Happens When the Mob is Right

​There is far too much cheerleading for the "wisdom of crowds." The undiscerning among us, often motivated by an understandable (if often mindless) disgust with institutions, tend to employ buzzwords like "crowdsourcing" and to preach the idea that "the people" are always right even if "the people ... More >>

Rupert Murdoch on Twitter: Insipid and Pedestrian

​It's sort of hard to believe after all this time, but I still regularly see people making fun of Twitter as if it's just a bunch of morons saying moron things. Okay, it is mostly that when taken as a whole. But I see very little of that kind of thing because I generally don't follow morons. Twitt ... More >>

The Year in Music Booze: Six Artist's Beverages That Made 2011 One Long Hangover

Rock 'n' roll culture died in 2011. It's got nothing to do with your opinion of Bon Iver, but everything to do with Rolling Stone. The former leading voice of modern music upheld its immaculate reputation this year... by starting an official wine club. It's filled with bottles branded with imagery f ... More >>

Jane Goodall's Fight Over Baby Food, Chairman Bao Wants to Race, and More Pizza

The past 24 hours in gossip, innuendo, and cold hard facts about the San Francisco food scene. We can honestly say we didn't see this one coming. Jane Goodall, mother to all primates, is suing local celebrity chef Tyler Florence's baby food company Sprout. Grub Street shares, via the New York Post, ... More >>

Why Are Tech Journos Suddenly Interested in News Corp. Scandal?

​When I was a staff editor at the tech-news site CNET News.com in the late '90s, one of the top editors there used to insist that we "localize" big news events by writing about how they were being covered and discussed on the Internet. So, for example, the death of Princess Di and the impeachment ... More >>

"Famous Food" on VH1: Guilty pleasure

​As we watched a real New Jersey housewife fight with a fictional New Jersey Big Pussy, we realized celeb-reality has officially taken over food TV. VH1's "Famous Food" is the latest food show to pop up on a previously non-food channel, a trend the Los Angeles Times wrote about recently. Th ... More >>

San Francisco Examiner Sure Seems to Love Hiring White Dudes

Them's the facts​Why the San Francisco Examiner gives its lone female columnist, Melissa Griffin, a full body photo to accompany her prose is one of those questions you ask, but then you kinda don't want to know the answer. As we all can see, in contrast, the newspaper's male columnists have nothi ... More >>

Apple Stonewalls Efforts to Prepare Steve Jobs Obituary

Steve Jobs​Apple is trying to hinder reporters' efforts to keep a stored obituary of CEO Steve Jobs up to date, according to the New York Post.In advance of the 2011 Worldwide Developers Conference, which starts today in San Francisco, Associated Press reporters called around to refresh quotes on ... More >>

Eating Lion Meat, Athletes Abandon Taco Bell, Waiters With Elephant Memories

​Today's notes on national stories, local trends, random tastes, and other bycatch dredged up from the food media. Jonathan Kauffman is out this week, so Jesse Hirsch is filling in on Talking Points. Teamwork! 1. Lion Meat for Sale. The Daily's investigative piece on lion meat sales has been rock ... More >>

SF Politicians Criticize NY Post Story on Alleged Strauss-Kahn Rape Victim's HIV Status

Dominique Strauss-Kahn​Every once in a while, San Francisco politicians surprise you. The city's Board of Supervisors is justly acknowledged for its symbolic gestures at the local level -- banning plastic bags, expressing support for cop killers, and the like. But the span of officialdom's tut-tut ... More >>

Calorie-Counting Apps, Coca-Growing Locavores, More Creepy Legislation

​Today's notes on national stories, local trends, random tastes, and other bycatch dredged up from the food media.​1. Is Meal Snap for real? MobileCrunch just posted word of a new calorie-counting iPhone app called Meal Snap. The premise: You take a picture of a dish, you add a caption, and the ... More >>

Michael Jackson, Zombie

The dark art of posthumous releases

"All Good Things": Little truth in true-crime story

"Client 9": Alex Gibney's doc rehabilitates Eliot Spitzer

Labor Pains

A fight between two unions here could set the course of the U.S. labor movement.

Thea Miller, S.F. Realtor, Claims Match.Com Predator John Egan Scammed Her For $250K

Brokenhearted -- and broke​Thea Miller, a San Francisco Realtor and divorced mother, has won a default judgment against a Match.com Lothario she says scammed a quarter of a million dollars out of her. John Egan allegedly sweet-talked Miller's credit card number away from her by posing as a suave a ... More >>

The Crazy Eight: 2009's Most Scandalous Moments in Celebrity Food Gossip

Andrew CrowleyBrit celeb chef Heston Blumenthal's restaurant allegedly poisoned 500 people in 2009.​Murders! Poisonings! Runaway grooms! The year in celebrity food gossip reads like a script for The Young and the Restless. Behold these crazy eight moments: 8. A household name in his native UK, che ... More >>

Chron Parent Company May Expand Empire. Just Not Print Empire.

With all the bloodletting at the San Francisco Chronicle this year, local readers could be forgiven the impression that all is not hunky-dory in the financial universe of Hearst Corp., which owns the Chron. But despite the newspaper's steady stream of layoffs, there are now indications that Hearst h ... More >>

The Yes Men Fix the World is a cheerful quest for social justice

Doggy Bag: Today's Odds and Ends

Our favorite morsels from the food blogs and beyond. Chicken shit: Seriously? According to Slashfood's Sarah LeTrent (who got it from the New York Post) a former finance director at J. P. Morgan has reportedly spent the last few years trying to crack KFC's 11 secret herbs and spices. He may be clos ... More >>

Slow-Sex Movement Picking up Speed: Documentaries, Books, and an Upcoming Lecture Series from SF's One Taste

Nicole Daedone -- the founder of San Francisco's orgasmic meditation center One Taste (and pictured above) -- is all about intimacy. And lately, that intimacy has been getting broadcasted into the stratosphere. After a front-page story in the style section of the New York Times o ... More >>

Living Without LeRoy

With her new memoir, literary co-hoaxer Savannah Knoop steps out of JT LeRoy's shadow. But can she step out of Laura Albert's?

TiVo Alert for Broadway Babies - ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway

'Drawing criticism' at the NY Post, and other Astonishing Tales

On Comics: Stars align for 'Iron Man'

Osama Hunter Greg Shade Captured on IndieFest Doc American Hero

The Slingshot Heard Round The Bay, Or Maybe Not

Like a Complete Unknown

Sealed With a Dis

A powerful Bay Area trial lawyer with political connections tries to keep details of his messy divorce from going public

This Week's Day-by-Day Picks

Puppy Love

Dogster hosts photos and profiles of almost 20,000 canines

The Oracle of San Francisco

No, not that jerk-led software behemoth down the Peninsula – the real Oracle, with the surefire, bet-the-house prophecies you deserve

Glub Glub

In which our first solo sail nearly becomes our last

A Duty to Hack

Adrian Lamo, the 22-year-old "homeless hacker" famous for raiding New York Times computers, pursues his vision of public service by cracking another major corporate network. It's a crime, of course. It's also what he was born to do.

What the Hell Is Copia?

At Robert Mondavi's new $55 million foodie mecca, you'll find seminars on goat cheese and mustard; surrealist movies; a SPAM exhibit; wine tastings; figurines of pooping Catholics -- everything, in fact, but the answer to that question.

Reel World

Filmmakers organize an artistic response to Sept. 11 and its aftermath

Dragon Bites

A Beautiful Day to Be Irradiated; We Have Plenty of Lines Open; Annals of Blowback; Press Release of the Week

Reel World

International Film Financing Conference, George Kuchar, Write It

The House of Tudor

Dog Bites

A Bang and a Whimper

I Was Looking packs a theatrical jolt; Remains is merely jolting

Night+Day

Proboscis Job?

The foundering Nose snorts Editor Jack Boulware out of a gig