He introduces it as a “where Obama is leading us,” in “traditional America vs. secular progressive America”. What is scary about SF? We’re so despicably tolerant. We get to know our homeless. We talk about sex, and we condone marijuana. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Bill O’Reilly Smear from Huffington Post.

Great quotes that have been getting attention on some discussion groups:

“You wouldn’t go to the Presidio at night, I wouldn’t” - Bill
“Every city has a tenderloin, and North Beach is San Francisco’s” - Bill
“Lots of dopes everywhere. Those clinics are everywhere.” - Bill

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Updated to clarify the suspect in this case was not laid off.

Friday a 47-year-old engineer who had been canned earlier in the week allegedly killed his company’s CEO, the operations VP, and the HR lady, before fleeing. Yesterday police arrested Jing Hua Wu, former test engineer at a semiconductor company called SiPort Inc. and were holding him in the Santa Clara County jail pending arraignment on three murder charges.

Update: An earlier version of this post implied that the alleged shooter might have snapped after being laid off. But a recent report on Valleywag states the suspect was fired, and that the company has never laid people off. A report on KCBS radio Monday morning said the suspect was fired for poor performance, though a profile on the station’s website still says he was laid off.

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I think the second (okay, well, third) weekend in November should be officially declared San Francisco’s Too Damn Many Film Festivals All At Once Weekend. Like a complete chump, I forgot to post about one of them in time for the opening: 3rd I South Asian Film Festival, which is pretty much how it sounds. This is their sixth time out. Check out the schedule here, and get your tickets here.

Tonight’s feature, screening at 8:30 PM, is called Kissing Cousins, and if I didn’t have a prior engagement, I’d drive out to the Brava tonight just to gaze at Rebecca Hazlewood on screen (pictured above with Samrat Chakrabarti at left) for 99 minutes. Although such devotion might be a little weird, since she’ll be there, along with producer Manish Goyal and director Amyn Caderali, one of the Bay Area’s own. Here’s the story, as told by Christopher Au:

Amir (Chakrabarti) is a professional heartbreaker. Except, he hasn’t dated any of the unfortunate souls with whom he breaks up—he’s just the hired messenger who bears the bad news. And for an additional fee, he can even get your stuff back! As his friends begin to couple up, get married and settle into new homes, they wonder if bachelor Amir will ever let his hardened heart fall in love.

When Amir’s gorgeous British cousin Zara (Rebecca Hazlewood, ER) visits him in Los Angeles, she fools his friends into thinking that she’s his girlfriend. But as Amir spends more time with Zara, she opens him up to feelings that have lay dormant for far too long. How long can they keep up this ruse of faux-love? Or will they become more than “just cousins”?

The rest of the schedule is pretty great too: it includes a wide range of documentaries; a screening of Om Shanti Om; A Throw of Dice, which is a 1929 silent film involving eastern splendor and torrid passions (what else?); and most irresistably, Hell’s Ground, which is best described as a Pakistani zombie flick: “They should have listened to the warnings of the creepy old guy at the chai stand a few miles back.” Yesssssss.

Oh yeah, they’re also playing the totally ignored, poorly covered Slumdog Millionaire on Sunday night at the Castro Theatre. Tickets are a bargain at $9 a show.

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As I mentioned last week, this weekend is so stuffed full of book events — oddly enough, most of them on Thursday — that this post covers only the next three days. Highlights are Bizarro, Ben Ratliff, Chip Kidd, Opium’s Literary Death Match, and the final SF in SF event for the year. Get all the details after the jump.
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Sure, you can follow the election at home, on TV or — for those households with no TV — obsessively reloading CNN and the New York Times until 4 in the morning. But it’s a lot more fun to get out of the house and watch the early returns with a big crowd of people, isn’t it? Thus:

The Yerba Buena Center, from 6:00 to 11:00 PM, will be the site of a
a huge non-partisan election night party, complete with free pizza after 8, a cash bar, big walls to scribble and draw on, and live music, DJs and dance performances along with big-screen TVs tuned to PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, “and everybody’s favorite, Fox News.” (They said it was non-partisan!) Check out the event page and humorous “press conference” here. Admission is free.

Over at Mezzanine, the San Francisco Obama campaign is having its official Counting-the-Chickens-As-They-Hatch party, and you can go too. Doors at 6:00. Admission is likewise free, but you should probably RSVP here. (Although I’m betting you can probably just wander in too, later on in the night.)

For those partisans out there, the Democratic Party will be here, and the Republican Party will be here.

Or you can go to any of these great events, too. To summarize: between Elixir, The Retox Lounge, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker’s, and Edinburgh Castle, you just can’t go wrong. And out in the Sunset at The Riptide, they’ll be playing the Daily Show election night special and offering their drinks at Depression-era prices. How appropriate!

Still undecided? Reload SFist in the morning and see what Brock hath wrought.

And wherever you end up — out on the town or just out on your couch — The Huffington Post has this interesting guide to watching Election Night Results. Don’t skip it — it’s worth reading!

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Blogger Rachel Kramer Bussel reports that blogger Jackson West, formerly of Valleywag, has surfaced at Lifehacker, where a nice recent post is Maximize your influence in the election.

I asked West what it was like to go from Valleywag to Lifehacker — both Gawker Media properties — and he wrote back that he was impressed at “how smart the site and its readers are.” He added that he hoped soon to report on the G1 “Google phone” and on audio, video and image editing. “And it’s only a matter of time before I drop in a reference to the Church of Bob Dobbs.”

Meanwhile fellow Valleywag castoff Nicholas Carlson has landed at Silicon Alley Insider.

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Check out this page of 84 parodies of Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster (original above left), taken from around the web. It’s pretty funny, overall; some are pro-Obama, others are not. Be warned: many are outright offensive — racist, sexist, what you will. This post is NOT an endorsement of the entire collection behind that link! However, several are worth saving. My favorites are the two above; other good ones are POPE, MIME, TYPE (which features Mavis Beacon) and perhaps best of all, CHOPE: Where Change Meets Hope.

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to a little chope this fall myself.

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This post is a little late, but if you’re still looking for something to do tonight, go check out the animated feature Fear(s) of the Dark, which will premiere tonight at the Embarcadero Center Cinema at 7:30 (general admission $12.50; discounts available). Check out the description of the film by Mike Plante of the Sundance Film Festival:

Spiders’ legs brushing against naked skin. Unexplained noises in the dark. A hypodermic needle getting closer and closer. A dead thing trapped in a bottle of formaldehyde. A growling dog running and on the hunt. A big empty house creaking . . . . Six amazing graphic artists and cartoonists lend their distinctive hands to stylize these dark nightmares with no color, only black, white and gray. With ultrarealistic techniques now possible, it is important to remember that animation is first and foremost art. Whether slick or rough, paint or pencil, or even originating from a computer, an image is carefully hand-designed for every single frame of film. It is the ultimate work of a creator, personally using the drawn frame, chiaroscuro contrast, the angle of the light and the line movement to tell a story. But it is also the duration of a shot, and what is and isn’t heard. It is the style of the art and the art of the storytelling that make Fear(s) of the Dark so wonderful. Since they come from the artists’ own phobias, you can trust a loving exploration into the surreal atmosphere of your creepiest dreams. As your emotions get worked over, you won’t jump up; you will sink in.

The animated shorts are by Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire.

At tonight’s show, Charles Burns himself will be on hand to do a Q&A session after the film.

If you can’t make it out tonight, don’t worry: it will be back on screen at one or more of the Landmark Theatres (they haven’t determined the venue yet) starting October 31st, Halloween. Appropriately enough!

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Examiner.com is looking for someone to blog about technology in general and MS Office in particular. It’s said to be a paid gig based on page views, though why a post on examiner.com on MS Office would get even a thousand page views is unclear to me. Another allegedly paid technology blogging job is here.

Meanwhile, foot soldiers are still needed by the Obama campaign.

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You might have slummed it- I did- a period where you just had no cash. I was in Paris (hence the photo) and felt keenly the lack of money and opportunity in a large city. Being an urban dweller we can’t stop ourselves from developing “blinders.” I’m the first to admit it. Friend from Kentucky was walking around the Tenderloin with me, and kept stopping to talk to folks sitting on the pavement, giving them lists of shelters and just listening to their stories. I wasn’t upset at him, just made me realize how we do it, we turn a blind eye. Visitors from Minnesota were really shocked, and I was helping to explain the situation to their daughters- 15 and 11- who hadn’t seen a homeless person in real life, ever. My explanation? A kind of rehearsed, jaded, insidery opinionated rant on Reaganomics in California (they were very conservative Bush supporters) and how in SF it’s “easy to be homeless.” I’m not proud of my rant, but it’s what I felt at the time and is justified historically, and factually, at least. I did keep repeating, “It’s self-medication,” as most of the folks Reagan kicked out of halfway houses were addicts or managing pain and mental issues in their own way. Still, just because it can be explained doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue. Hopefully, with a solution.

My favorite local charity: North Beach Citizens. What’s yours?

This post was inspired by Blog Action Day, if you’re a blogger please contribute by writing about poverty.

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