Thanks to our cigarette-smoking president, cigarette smoking has gotten a lot pricier in the last few years. Although I suspect the prez is being kinda paternal (“don’t do what I did, America”) in projecting his nicotine-guilt upon us, it is helping people quit. But SOME of us (me) just don’t want to.

Thanks to our cigarette-smoking president, cigarette smoking has gotten a lot pricier in the last few years. Although I suspect the prez is being kinda paternal (“don’t do what I did, America”) in projecting his nicotine-guilt upon us, it is helping people quit. But SOME of us (me) just don’t

Little Window Mark Twain’s oft-quoted appraisal of S.F’s cruel and spiteful summer climate has been ringing in my ears for about a month now; July hit and like clockwork the Great Grayness was pulled over the length and width of S.F like a wool blanket being drawn up to the

Panchita’s Pupuseria And so I continue my mission to find a pupusa that would justify, at least in my mind, their ubiquity, nay, their very existence.  In Panchita’s No. 2 I’ve found a pupuseria whose product at least gives me hope and prevents me from writing them off as nothing

Fireside Lounge For those who aren’t familiar with the tiny appendage attached like a tenacious little barnacle to the lower side of Oakland known as Alameda….that’s what it is.  You reach it and escape it vis a vis one of two means, a tunnel on one end, and a bridge

What exactly is the correlation between being broke and being obsessed with/nostalgic for/stuck in the ’80s? I know it’s not just me. Go to any hipster neighborhood (Williamsburg, etc.), try to picture everyone without their iPhones, and voila, you could very well be in 1984. Is it because hipsters are

Whiz Burger The above photo is my ham-fisted attempt to juxtapose two distinct types of iconography: one surrounding retro burger joints and the other, Catholic churches.  I wouldn’t blame you if it didn’t elicit the observation that the almighty American hamburger is something of a golden calf, an object of