Lots of good music has been, and continues trickling through the local live music stream lately, and this week is no exception. Tonight, the amazing and amusing Dengue Fever is at The Castro Theater, while the Red Devil Lounge offers up a rare opportunity to see Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan’s latest band. The silver haired Brit who relocated to Austin TX, continues his legacy as a road warrior with a resume including too many greats & near greats to mention in one blog post. If you are familiar with the Faces and Rod Stewart, The Rolling Stones or Billy Bragg…you have likely been exposed to his key tickling skills.

Mac's Latest Release on his Maniac imprint "Never Say Never"

His latest indie album is a solid & sincere effort from a veteran rocker, and of course he’ll likely spice up the live set with old faves, possibly dating back to his first chart topping days circa 1966 with Steve Marriott & Ronnie Lane in The Small Faces.

On Thursday night, while Bimbo’s in North Beach features Cake, meanwhile the deep down underground will possibly be sucked into the Vortex Room with Mr. Lucky and the Ramshackle Romeos. Others may be down on Harrison @ The Eagle Tavern. Bands playing there include former Nice Strong Arm bandleader Kevin Thompson’s new project “bun bun bun” and Sunward Spike. Ruby Howl hits the stage in the middle slot, a band featuring the talented alterna-chanteuse Laurie Hall who has played in numerous local combos over the past couple decades. Maybe you saw her with her mom in the Hall Flowers, or with her sis in Ovarian Trolley, or perhaps opening for the Pixies reunion at The Greek with Knife + Fork. She knows her craft and has a new band called Ruby Howl plying their trade with her husband Pat and a somewhat shy drummer who wishes to remain anonymous. More info on Ruby Howl at
http://www.myspace.com/rubyhowl

Pat & Laurie

Friday night , two soul music legends hit the stage on a double bill at the Independent, Booker T. Jones of the MG’s preceded by Detroit’s own Bettye LaVette, both of whom are promoting new albums on the Anti label, an Epitaph offshoot.

On Saturday night @ Annie’s Social Club, old school punkers will be in force catching Social Unrest, and Ribzy as well as the debut of Jello Biafra’s latest unnamed musical project. Before leaving on a reunion tour with his old band, Faith No More bassist Billy Gould will be backing Biafra alongside drummer Jon Weiss and guitar wizard Ralph Spight of Victim’s Family. If you get bored of the jurassic punks onstage at this Alcoholocaust, head to the backroom and be yer own D.I.Y rock star via the punk schlock karaoke set up…

With the Attorney General’s of 40 states breathing down their necks, the folks at Craigslist have succumbed to pressure and have revised their policies on sexual service adverts. Not only will the ads no longer be free (with proceeds supposedly going to charity), but the once cute and cuddly Cole Valley based website whose pages have become a haven for sex traffickers & pimps have removed much of the anonymity factor from posting. Sex ad posters must now verify a phone number and have valid ID, which has pared down the prurient listings by about 80% so far.

CEO Jim Buckmaster told the NY times some of the ads were “crossing the line,” and that “We resolved to see what we could do to get that stuff off the site.”

Craigslist’s legal travails don’t end there, as the site has lawsuits flying between itself and eBay, who were able to buy a chunk of the biz from a former partner of Craig Newmark’s and they announced plans last week to sue several companies that provide services which help users circumvent the site’s abuse protections. They’ve been involved in blocking and/or prosecuting the offenders by enlisting the aid of ISPs and police.

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.

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.

Think the economic meltdown can’t touch your high tech job? Valleywag announced today they are laying off three staffers, cutting writers’ “page view bonus,” and taking other steps in anticipation of lost advertising.

The layoffs affected two of my favorite bloggers, Jackson West and Melissa Gira Grant, as well as associate editor Nicholas Carlson (no offense to Carlson, but I’ve followed West’s and Grant’s posts for a long time). Here’s hoping they all find good homes.

A man whom police said was a transient living in his car before he allegedly ran over and killed two elderly women — one of whom he had to reach out his driver’s side window to push off the hood of his car before speeding away — was a former elite Silicon Valley engineer whose team invented a cancer-eradicating x-ray machine. But C. Wayne Cox, now 66, was laid off from that job in 1996 in a re-org, divorced two years later, and fell off the map. The white-haired former engineer was arrested while surfing the web in a Santa Clara public library after the librarian recognised him from news reports.

In the current SF Weekly, Matt Smith documents how a mysterious corporate entity called SFO Enterprises, formed by San Francisco International Airport managers to extend their reach beyond SFO itself, ruined a project to upgrade the airport in the capital city of Honduras. According to Smith’s article, the project was so messed up that it led to at least one fatal incident when an airliner ran off the end of a runway, killing five and injuring 65. Smith goes on to detail the project, the tortured relationship between the Honduran government and SFOE, and the economic “chaos” that resulted when the government shut down the airport for large jets after the accident.

A Google search points to many SF Weekly articles on the mysterious SFO Enterprises going back at least to 2001, but this latest one is so damning it’s a wonder Mayor Gavin Newsom doesn’t do something.

I saw that occasional SF Metblogs contributor and relentless self promoter and sex book author Violet Blue is the latest recipient of the tempest in a web teapot award. The LA Times website has David Sarno covering a fracas in which any Violet Blue mentions or posts have been deleted from Boing Boing and it’s archives.

Writes Sarno:

“I’ve been wracking my brain thinking of what issues I might’ve come down on the wrong side of,” Blue told me on the phone. “There’s been no argument, there’s been no disagreement, no flame war, none of the usual things.”

Could Boing Boing really be a Stalin era throwback that wants to erase it’s own history, and somehow have the world to believe the widely read SF Gate columnist doesn’t exist?

At AdRants they speculated a possible conflict with blog ad provider Federated Media, which seemed somewhat unlikely to be involved in editorial concerns (IMHO ) since they supply ads for dozens of popular sites including the Metblogs network.

BoingBoing eventually issued it’s own terse comment and explanation after the web “sh*tstorm” lapped up on it’s serenely acerbic shores:

Read the LA times blog, or for a more concise semi ad biz related wrap up read more at AdRants.

A couple of weeks back we posted about a court battle that is raging in sf between a tenant and his alleged slumlords. The alleged were brought up on criminal charges and were jailed at the time with an amazingly high bail for their crimes. The judge has decided to lower bail and the fur is still flying as the husband paid bail and the wife sat in jail. And I guess the Chron published a picture of one of the accused today, although I missed that, maybe in the paper today?

Prosecutor Max Peltz urged that bail remain the same, saying Morrow was hardly a vexatious litigant. He also stressed that Morrow was just one of four tenants who allegedly had been victimized by the Macys.
Peltz said that over nine years, Morrow has filed four legal actions: a still-pending lawsuit against the Macys, one against the building’s prior owners in which he won a settlement, and the failed request for restraining orders against both Macys. Labeling Morrow a vexatious litigant was a baseless effort to “malign the victim,” Peltz said.

Bail cut for S.F. landlords in tenant terror case.

The annual Java One conference in San Francisco is still going on, and if there are a lot of sick tech geeks today, it’s because they just discovered that dozens of attendees caught norovirus, the same fast-spreading illness that has afflicted cruise ships for the last several years.

People with norovirus (CDC page) experience vomiting, fever and diarrhea for up to 48 hours. It’s not fatal but when you’re in its grip you may wish it was.