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People complain that San Francisco's dating scene sucks ass, however, if you get creative you can find some places to meet people. When I was desperate single I've hung around the art schools or tried to pick-up tourists at Pier 39 and get into other shenanigans. Gridskipper offers a few other not-so-sleazy suggestions to meet that special someone. —James Y Lee

I apologize for the lack of posts; I was getting busy with Christmas and mourning the death of the oldest orangutan. However, LGA is back. First order of business is to show you how to get some Gameboy and PlayStation games onto your iTouch or iPhone. It's still in beta testing and it'll feel like you were playing Castlevania in Morse Code, but we all know all that tapping is well worth it. —James Y Lee

How the Internet imitates life

By Joe Eskenazi

Like any child brought up on Channel 9 PBS nature documentaries, I learned at a very young age about the Monarch and Viceroy butterflies.

The former, a beautiful, bright orange creature, is poisonous if imbibed by birds and other bug-eating beasties. If a bird snaps up a Monarch butterfly he'll quickly be doing the same thing your family dog did after snacking on grass.

The Viceroy, meanwhile, is a virtual doppelganger for the Monarch -- but is not poisonous. Yet its incredible similarity to its inedible colleague serves it well.

This takes us, naturally, to the world of the Internet. Think of Gmail as the Monarch butterfly -- it's big, well-known and other sites would do well to ride its coat-tails. And they do.

Perhaps because I feel the need to set the thermostat in my apartment to 62 degrees, my fingers were a little stiff last night and I typed in www.Gamil.com by mistake. And instead of a login page, I was confronted with the art illustrating this story -- an apparent pair of hairy, bare bear feet severed at the ankles and shoved into heels collaboratively designed by Iceberg Slim and the Marquis de Sade.

A quick peek at www.alexa.com informs me, however, that gamil.com is pulling in more page views than the site you're now reading, sfweekly.com. Are this many people interested in severed bear paw fashion -- or are plenty of people mistyping "gmail"? The answer to both questions is likely "yes."

And yet gamil.com is far from the only site piggybacking off of Gmail...

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Photo | Joe Eskenazi, taken at 706 Sacramento St., S.F.

You know the best thing about Hi-Times Discount Office Products? With the money you save, you can stock up on Chee-tos or grab a burrito (or dim sum at one of 37 restaurants nearby).

Hey, we hear they've got killer deals on paper...just not of the Zig-Zag variety.

Here at S.F. Signs of the Apocalypse, we do appreciate the creatively named businesses. Hi-Times is no King Dong restaurant, which has been brightening spirits in Berkeley for decades. But, then again, this is S.F. Signs of the Apocalypse.

Remember, if you see crazy-assed signs like this, this or this, take a picture of them and send it here.

-- Joe Eskenazi

Join legions of other aspiring and underemployed writers for the Fifth San Francisco Writers Conference February 15 - 17 at the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins Hotel (999 California at Mason). The shindig promises more "how to" sessions than you can shake an unpublished manuscript at as well as celebrity book singings and workshops. Click here for more.

-- Brian Bernbaum

Tatiana the tiger's official MySpace memorial page already has 118 friends. You knew it was coming, San Francisco. (via SFist)

by Benjamin Wachs

As we enter week three of absolutely no Board of Supervisors meetings held, one bleak fact becomes terribly clear: these fuckers only worked one week in December.

Not even a rampaging tiger attack could convince them to hold a committee hearing.

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by Benjamin Wachs

Life just got lonlier for a Sancturary City. Michigan, one of 7 remaining states that offered drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, decided yesterday that driving in the U.S. is a members only privilege.

The reason? (at least the legal one): people who aren’t in America legally can’t be lawful residents of Michigan. Hmmmm … that actually makes sense.

Michigan is just the latest domino to fall: in the last year North Carolina, Tennessee, and New Mexico also clamped down.

That leaves just six remaining states - Hawaii, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington – offering licenses to people without citizenship documentation. This year New York considered allowing illegals to get drivers licenses for about 10 minutes, then crashed back down to reality along with Eliot Spitzer’s poll numbers.

And, of course, San Francisco voted last month to offer municipal IDs to any city residents. That’s not as good as drivers licenses, but, definitely sets us apart from the national trend and gives us one last thing in 2007 to feel incredibly smug about.

The final installment of our recap – in which we leave the computer room and report upon real life

By Joe Eskenazi

Today: You Are There

The life of an Internet journalist is not quite as glamorous as you might think. Take Josh Wolf for example: Is spending time in prison and making liquor in the toilet just one of those things, like a trip to the moon on gossamer wings? Hell no!

And yet, from time to time, we escape from behind the keyboard and hang out with petulant politicians, homeless people, aggressive cops or mentally challenged pole dancers. Yep, this is the life for me!

Here are some of The Snitch’s top You Are There first-person tales of 2007:

Web Editor David Downs peruses charity night at the strip joint (technically this appeared on our sister blog, All Shook Down. But I’m posting it anyway).

Benjamin Wachs walks the mean (and none too mean) streets of Oakland with Barack Obama’s wet-behind-the-ears volunteers. Who says there’s no there there?

Yours truly hits the cold, wet corridors of the Castro for this year’s Halloween police state (and, yes, a girl asked me if I was dressed as Harry Potter. Not good times. Bad times).

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An explanation by Benjamin Wachs

Since both doctors and lawyers operate by billable hours, asking a lawyer how the city should pay for doctors is like making a mobius strip out of invoices. You could go round and round this thing forever.

Yesterday U.S. District Judge Jeffery White started that infinite loop when he ruled against the city’s health care plan because he said it can’t force local businesses to chip in. Today City Attorney Dennis Herrera is in front of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals taking it around the next curve by saying “yes it can.”

Here’s the argument:

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Picture this: Our favorite photos on The Snitch this year

By Joe Eskenazi

Today: Rather Than Write 1,000 Words – Here’s a Picture
Friday: You are There

Hey, it’s not complex. Here are some of the notable photos and artwork that appeared on The Snitch this year.

Beards, beards, beards, beards, lovely beards, wonderful beards!

Who knew Matt Smith could draw? And is anything better than drawings of Sean Penn sneering?

MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

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Comment boards have changed journalism. Letters to the editor are down. The words "nigger," "kike," and "douchebag" are way up. It's the SF Weekly's policy that the comments on our site best reflect the reality of the Internet — a pitch-black, anonymous, and public room with a bunch of dickheads running around trying to punch other well-meaning people in the throat.

Enter at your own risk. This is Kings of Commenting. — David Downs

This week, we said the Internet is full of mean, mean bad people insensitive to the death of a regular joe.
And some regular joe said,

shit happens

We said the "One Less Bike" campaign is grammatically incorrect.
bob reminds us we can't use engrish either,

Quotations aren't "made," they are first "statements" or "remarks" and become quotations when repeated or attributed. In other words, it wasn't a "quotation" when Bush made it.

This week, we said Mark Morford = stupid.
And Dan reminded us of our own traffic,

Ben, I bet if you posted this over on the comment page for one of Morford's articles, more people would see it.

dude get a fucking life

We said, 'Hey, here's some holiday parties.'
Douchebag Jones said,

God you're a fucking idiot!

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At approximately 5 p.m. on Christmas Day, a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo somehow got loose and attacked the 12.26 slow news day. The 100-year-old Day was busy reporting on after-Christmas sales and New Year's resolution fluff pieces during his annual rounds of doing nothing at the zoo, when the escaped tiger mauled, then killed Mr. Slow News Day.

Death of Day spread immediately, and editors rejoiced as calls were placed to reporters and pundits whose job it would be to weigh in on the attack and what it means TO AMERICA and the ongoing war of MAN vs. ANIMALS.

File photos of tigers were pulled. A schematic of the zoo with an arrow pointing to where the tigers USUALLY ARE was created. A list of maulings was drawn up by the AP. And the Chronicle strategized a battle plan for the next few days of tiger mauling stories including:

"What's Wrong with the SF Zoo?"

"Tatiana's Family: She Was Misunderstood"

and

"Global Warming a Possible Enabler of Tiger Attacks"

As of 9:32 a.m. today, NPR, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and 1,400 other news organizations had dispatched camera crews to the site of the Slow News Day's death, hoping for entrails that could hold them over until the hubbub had died down and they could go back to phoning it in till January 2.

Calls to the Beginning of Kwanzaa were not returned, but Kwanzaa did issue the following statement:

"While we regret to hear of the untimely death of the slow news day and its attendant focus on me, we are not surprised to see the mainstream media indulging in this type of sensationalist drivel a la the tsunami of a few years back. A nation gets the media it deserves, and it gets it good and hard. Good night and good luck, you doomed fuckers."

(Photo courtesy of the Daily Mail)

Merry day-after-Christmas (Boxing Day). Today’s present: Deep thoughts from The Snitch

By Joe Eskenazi

Today: Analyze This!
Thursday: Rather Than Write 1,000 Words – Here’s a Picture
Friday: You are There

If you’ve been to a urologist recently, you don’t want to hear the word “analysis.” But for readers of The Snitch, we hope the connotation is far more positive.

This year, if you read The Snitch, you could definitely hold your own at the average party (though holding your own at a party is often considered incredibly rude. Seriously, adjust in private).

We took a hard look at:

Muni – What does Prop. A really do? Does Muni Chief Nathaniel Ford deserve $336,000? Does anyone? And can Muni ever be on-time more often than it is now?

Why does the city spend $400,000 for a public restroom? And what do other cities pay?

BELIEVE YOU ME, THERE'S MORE AFTER THE JUMP

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A weeklong rundown of what kept The Snitch busy this year.

By Joe Eskenazi

Today: Breaking News on The Snitch
Wednesday: Analyze This!
Thursday: Rather Than Write 1,000 Words, Here’s a Picture
Friday: You Are There

We know, we know. On a Weblog you’re supposed to link to someone else’s work, write a snarky comment, or post a LOLcat. And we do. But, sometimes, God help us, we break a big news story.

Here are a few of the stories you’d have learned about before the average bear if you read us religiously:

— We were the first publication to run a story about the city’s million-dollar public housing cameras having not contributed one iota to capturing violent criminals on film.

— We broke the story that San Francisco bumbled its Halloween plans to the point where it called off this year’s Castro festivities.

CLICK "MORE" FOR MORE. IT'S PRETTY INTUITIVE.

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