The much-anticipated snowfall in San Francisco was the center of a weeklong news cycle, boosting everyone's belief that we would see flakes fall for the first time in 30 years.
All week, forecasters and hyped-up news stories predicted snow by Friday. As of Friday morning, temperatures were indeed chilly, but we only saw rays of sun. By the late afternoon the mercury had dropped to 44 degrees Fahrenheit -- but still no rain or snow.
There were scattered reports of sleet in Santa Rosa and a "few ice pellets" 30 miles south of San Francisco in Burlingame, which by the way meteorologists don't count as snow fall.
As the old adage goes -- no good deed goes unpunished. A samaritan discovered this when he tried to help another man who was getting beaten at a Muni stop this week.
Police report that a little before 8 p.m. on Wednesday, a man was standing at a Muni bus stop on the corner of Silver and Mission Streets, listening to music on his headphones. Three men walked up and surrounded him so he couldn't escape.
The three guys started punching him for no reason, knocking him to the ground, where they then continued beating the man.
Another person passing by stopped to try to help the victim. Sadly, he got his own beating when the three men turned on him, according to police.
Imperial County Clerk Chuck Storey is attempting to sign onto the legal challenge to Judge Vaughn Walker's decision last year that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.
We wrote earlier this week about a totally awesome play date that took place at bad-boy actor Charlie Sheen's house with San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson and some other baseball greats.
Well, some more information on the bromance between these two celebrities emerged yesterday, when Sheen gave a long, strange interview on the Alex Jones Show. His statements on air assailing the creator of his hit television series, "Two and a Half Men," caused CBS and Warner Bros. Television to announce that they were canceling production of the show for the rest of the season.
In one of the more logical patches of his Colonel Kurtz-like ramblings, Sheen praised Wilson as "radical" and bestowed upon him the title of "Vatican assassin" -- apparently a term he applies to his buddies.
Playstation 3 owners who have been grousing over their video game gadgets have something more to complain about.
A federal judge has dismissed most their claims filed in a class action lawsuit against Sony last year. A group of gamers accused the entertainment giant of duping them into buying what they thought was both a Playstation 3 and a personal computer.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in San Francisco, Playstation 3 owners say Sony defrauded them by touting the new Playstation 3 as a personal computer, allowing users to play games, surf the web, and watch films.
They accuse the company of unfair competition, breach of warranty, and computer fraud. But on Feb. 17, a federal judge dismissed most of those claims.
Public Defender Jeff Adachi is firing back against local labor leaders and legislators trying to draw a link between his pension-reform efforts in San Francisco and the battle over the future of organized labor that is playing out in Wisconsin.
Adachi, a Democrat, says that efforts to compare him to Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin -- including bizarre speculations that he is somehow connected to the Tea Party movement -- are "red-baiting" intended to obscure a serious conversation about the financial problems posed by current pension and health-care costs for city employees.
Exhibit A in his argument is a point he says his critics have ignored -- the fact that public employees in Wisconsin have already agreed to financial concessions similar to those Adachi is advocating.
"If we were in Wisconsin, the workers there would have agreed to the changes that Prop. B would have made," Adachi says. "The labor movement in Wisconsin is much more realistic and practical in dealing with its issues there."
The stylistic differences between former Mayor Gavin Newsom and the current Mayor Ed Lee are too many to list here. Yet the one distinct deviation certainly worth noting is their relationship with 49ers president Jed York.
Lee reportedly met with the 49ers president yesterday in is office, hoping to start a "much better relationship" with York, who -- along with many others -- has had a prickly past with Newsom. Lee did nothing to convince the 49ers president to keep the team here, but at the very least they got along.
It was nothing more than a "get to know you session," and so far York tells reporters he likes what he sees. He especially likes the fact that Lee, who was appointed to finish out Newsom's mayoral term, isn't playing politics.
"He's not beholden to anybody who gave to his campaign and things like that," York tells the Chronicle today.
Clearly, someone couldn't wait any longer to know their HIV status, and thought the quickest way to get results was to rip off a bunch of test kits from a Bay Area company.
At about 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday police were called to investigate some medical supplies that were found in John McLaren Park.
When they arrived, they realized the medical supplies were a bunch of HIV test kits -- the same ones that had been reported stolen out of San Jose earlier that morning, according to police reports.
Here's some fodder for Republicans who believe Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's arrogance knows no bounds.
The Democratic National Committee kindly wanted to honor Nancy Pelosi for all of her hard work as the former Speaker of the House. But apparently, their praise didn't go far enough for the powerful Pelosi.
At the last minute, Pelosi's daughter, Christine Pelosi, a democratic political strategist, asked her fellow committee members to alter the resolution, at the behest of her mother, who felt the committee had overlooked some of her key accomplishments.
"You think I'm kidding," the younger Pelosi said to the committee, which met on Thursday.
Readers might remember the truly disturbing case of Christine Shreeve Hubbs, the attractive Mormon mother from Livermore who was arrested in August for allegedly having sex with young teenage boys. Now in a plea deal, Hubbs will likely go to prison for five years.
On Thursday, Hubbs plead no contest to four counts of having sex with underage boys. She is expected to serve five years in state prison as well as register as a sex offender for life. In exchange for her plea, prosecutors dropped 63 other counts related to the incident.
The "remorseful" mother and wife of a dentist is accused of buying water pellet guns for some teenage boys and letting them fire out the window as she drove her Hummer around the neighborhood. She then took the teens to another location and "exchanged sex acts," which gave her the nickname "Hummer Mom."
