Really tall

Virality is kind of a white whale in the Internet world. It's hard to engineer -- though many have tried -- and it often smiles on those who least expect it.

Take Ben Pack, for instance, the 6-foot-10 San Francisco State journalism student whose claim to fame is, well, that he's 6-foot-10. Two weeks ago, the 23-year-old senior made a Tumblr about it, after walking into a parking lot and realizing that he was tall enough to stand eye-to-eye with the "clearance" sign for truck beds.

Clearly, he had something to show the world.

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Nelson Estrada

Like many San Franciscans, we spent years convinced the world ended at the Golden Gate Bridge. We knew the 280 freeway led to Google, and heard rumors about people with yards in the East Bay, but as far as art, culture, and politics were concerned, S.F. was the place to be. But in the last few years, more and more of the cool kids have been moving across the pond to Oakland, and for good reason.

Oakland muscled in on S.F.'s cultural turf last year with the monthly street festival First Fridays. Then -- beating us at our own game -- Oakland ranked higher than San Francisco on the Advocate's list of gay-friendly cities. Here are seven reasons we should all get down in the Oaktown.

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Videos of the Day: The 10 Best Views in S.F. and Oakland

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While we were busy calling ourselves Social Media Gurus and loving vodka, videographer Jess Dunlap spent her 2012 creating this gorgeous 4-minute time-lapse video of California, titled Monolation. It features over 17,000 heart-stopping landscape photographs, and camera movements that feel somehow both sped up and as if time is standing still.

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It's time to stop crying into our artisinal Frito pies over losing the Super Bowl, San Franciscans, because a new survey has designated S.F. the seventh happiest place in the world (and the only U.S. city to make the cut).

See Also: San Francisco Voted America's Best City 2012

San Francisco Is a Great Place to Live if You're a Man

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via Tumblr

In perhaps the most adorable coming out story ever, 15-year-old Laurel (and Ellen DeGeneres fan) decided to tell her parents she's gay with a cake and a pun-filled note.

Here's the full note, in all its gratuitous pun glory:

See Also: 10 Reasons You Should Come Out of the Closet

Video of the Day: The Onion Mocks Jodie Foster's Quazi-Coming Out Speech

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Artist Brittany Tokyo shows off her work.

Recently, we featured a nail art and jewelry show with the headline, Get a Free Hand Job in the Mission. And while we might have had a little fun with puns and a collective snicker at the show's title -- "Hand Jobs" -- we can assure you that the art on display was no joke. The show was -- hands down -- the best nail art we'd ever seen.

See Also: Art Beat: Fashion Photographer Liz Caruana Documents Bay Area Designers

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Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis

Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665)

Tracy Chevalier wrote a best-selling historical novel about her. Scarlett Johansson played her in a movie. Softly lit, looking over her shoulder with her lips slightly parted, she is sometimes called the "Dutch Mona Lisa." Who is she? Is she about to say something? And why, for God's sake, is a 17th century Dutch girl wearing a turban?

Johannes Vermeer's enigmatic Girl with a Pearl Earring, the most famous of his 36 paintings, comes the de Young Museum for its first stop on a tour of the United States. As befits its rock star status, Vermeer's small painting hangs in its own gallery in the exhibit, "Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis," which opens on Saturday, January 26, and includes 34 other paintings from the collection.

See Also: Photo Negative: Two Exhibits Reconsider Historic Images
Recent Acquisitions: New Exhibition Forever Alters the Chinese Culture Foundation

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It's about 5 p.m. on Sunday, January 20. The 49ers just secured a place in the Superbowl, but I'm not out celebrating, because I'm locked in a room with 11 strangers. Inside the room is a desk, a couch, art, and some random furniture. There are two doors, and both of them are locked. One with a padlock, and the other with a regular door knob. We have one hour to escape.

See Also: Black Friday: SF Weekly Takes Masochism to a New Level, Spends 24 Hours at Walmart

Columnist Anna Pulley Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of ... Fear, but She Beats It

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Say what you will about the prevalence of human feces and sky-rocketing rents -- the Bay Area is still an indisputably beautiful place. These videos by Shia Productions capture some of the natural and man-made wonders of San Francisco and Oakland that are rife for exploration, cheap dates, or just to gawk at the sheer loveliness of our hilly homes.

See Also: Hundreds of Starlings Fly through Downtown San Francisco (Video)
What Gay Men Think About Vaginas (Video)

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In 1993, the Gracie family of Brazil changed the martial arts world forever. They held a no-holds-barred fighting tournament in Denver, CO., billed as the Ultimate Fighting Championship. There were no weight classes, very few rules, and experts from several different fighting styles were invited to compete. The smallest competitor, Royce Gracie, won the competition, defeating all of his opponents in under five minutes. Royce credited his family's style of jiu-jitsu with his success.

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A Delicate Balance: Five Questions for S.F.'s Hottest Pole Acrobat

An Honest Liar: 5 Questions for a Magician

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