A San Francisco jury decided that the quirky and literally colorful Larry "Juicye" Edmond didn't violate a restraining order his neighbor had taken out on him after the LGBT activist and City Hall regular winked at him at a memorial service.
According to the Public Defender's Office, the jury deliberated for no more than 40 minutes before determining that Edmond didn't mean to violate his restraining order. What's more, jurors felt that Edmond's neighbor, who was only identified as a 47-year-old man, wasn't being honest.
Edmond, whose only crime is being eye-catching, was arrested on April 19 when his downstairs neighbor told police that Edmond had winked at him before taking a seat close by during a memorial service in a common area of their residential hotel.
The neighbor also said that Edmond came within 15 yards of him at City Hall on June 5 -- voting day.
Not many missing person stories have a happy ending. But Monday was truly a happy night for Deborah Berlingeri, when she was reunited with her 22-year-old son, Evan Flanary, who had been missing for nearly a week.
Here's what his mother posted on the website created for her missing son:
"Good news. Evan has been found safe. Praise the Lord and pass the GPS! This website is for sale. If you have a wayward child called Evan, or you've simply left someone called Evan in the toy department of a crowded store ... have we got a deal for you!"
Berlingeri reported Flanary missing on June 19 after he went to meet up with a stranger he had contacted through a cell phone app. He was last seen in the Mission and had not been heard from since.
When we last checked in nearly three weeks ago, supporters and opponents of Proposition 29, which would increase a cigarette tax by $1 per pack, were probably tempted to chain-smoke away the nerves from too-close-to-call election results.
During the three-day series between the Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, you can expect the usual trash-talk and peanut-spilling around the stadium. That's all innocent fun, but what cops will be on the lookout for are the rowdy and violent fans.
So far, these patrols have helped keep the peace.
SFPD Officer Gordon Shyy told us that yesterday, during the first of three games this week, "nothing violent" happened, which he attributes to public awareness of this increased and incognito police presence. If troublemakers know more officers are milling around, "they may think twice," he said.
Now for the burning question: How do presumably pro-Giants police feel about sporting Dodger blue?
Oreo Cookie just gave San Francisco a new reason to devour its delicious processed-sugar-filled cookies: the homosexual Oreo.
After thousands attended Gay Pride in San Francisco and New York City, Oreo created a photo of a rainbow cookie, which it then displayed on its Facebook page. Sadly, the cookie isn't available for consumption (yet?), but at least Oreo is showing its true colors.
Naturally, (or unnaturally, if you will), Christian cookie fans refuse to eat this gay confection. In fact, there's some threat of a biscuit boycott circulating on the Internet. Oreo's Facebook post generated some 22,000 comments from cookie-eaters on both sides of the wafer.
Unless you're within the devoted cadre of Slovakian hockey aficionados, you probably don't know much about Peter Sivak. You've probably heard of the San Jose Sharks, however. They're the guys with the teal uniforms who fly onto the rink via an oversize shark head and through a mist of dry ice.
Well, the San Francisco Bulls have the former. They're still working on the latter.
At a press conference this morning, Bulls President and coach Pat Curcio announced the signing of Sivak, the team's first player. The 30-year-old Slovakian comes with a solid resume; playing winger for MsHK Zilina, he was one of the most prolific scorers in the top Slovak league. His 51 points in 55 games trailed only Ziggy Palffy and Miroslav Satan. These aging Slovaks used to be top-flight National Hockey League scorers; Satan also moved a lot of jerseys for obvious reasons.
A cyclist was taken to the hospital this morning after being hit by a car at the corner of Cortland Avenue and Bayshore Boulevard.
Officer Gordon Shyy had very little information at this time, but said that the cyclist, whose condition is unknown, was at the intersection about 8:37 a.m. when the accident occurred.
Last week we told you that Oracle CEO and obnoxious bajillionaire Larry Ellison had big plans to purchase part of Hawaii -- and we weren't kidding. According to press reports, the sale went through yesterday, and Ellison will officially own 98 percent of the island of Lanai by the end of the week.
The Hawaii Public Utilities Commission reportedly approved the transaction paving the way for Ellison to purchase majority of the 141-square-mile island from Castle & Cooke Inc. on June 27.
Reporters could not reach Ellison for comment, presumably because he was too busy buying an island.
If it wasn't clear before, it should be now: Facebook doesn't think much of you. Or me, or any of its supposed 900 million users. We are products, not customers. The customers are the people who buy the incredibly cheap, often sleazy ads that Facebook sells.
The latest datapoint supporting the fact that Facebook is very much patterned after founder Mark Zuckerberg's nerdy, antisocial worldview: The company has taken it upon itself to, without warning, change the e-mail address on user profiles to so-called Facebook e-mail. This isn't actually e-mail as most people think of it -- it's Facebook's internal messaging system.
When you created (or edited) your profile, you decided which e-mail address, if any, you wanted displayed. The default was the address you used to sign up. Facebook's attitude, though, is that it knows better what its users want than users do: Users are just "eyeballs," perhaps connected to a limbic system, but not to a brain. So it yanked (or soon will yank) whatever e-mail address you had there and replaced it with its own.
While certainly annoying, this isn't that huge a deal, really. (And contrary to some overblow claims, it's certainly not the equivalent of a "man in the middle attack," which is a hacker tactic for hijacking e-mail). But it's part of a pattern of arrogance and thoughtlessness that goes back to Facebook's beginnings in Zuckerberg's dorm. He didn't treat his own business partners very well -- why should we expect him to care about users?
