'Bred Crumbs

04:36 PM Wanted to watch the premiere of Kevin Smith's new short film The Flying Car on Wednesday night, but couldn't bear the thought of stomaching the Leno show to do so? Well, that's what the Internet's for; View Askew and News Askew both have a variety of sizes and shapes of downloads of this funny bit, which basks in the trademark Askew vulgarity without using R-rated words. The short shares a typically fanciful discussion between our old Clerks friends while they're stuck in a traffic jam. Think of it as My Drivetime with Dante. And if you choose a small download, don't fret about missing any visual details; remember, this is a Kevin Smith film.

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One of my favorite San Francisco tourist attractions is one most tourists don't know about. Musée Mechanique, tucked into the basement of the Cliff House, on the enticingly rocky bluffs above Ocean Beach, houses ancient video-game predecessors and other relics from the long-gone Playland-at-the-Beach amusement park. The museum -- and especially its moon-shaped fortune teller that my friends and I call the Giant Rice Cake -- utterly charmed me during my first visit here seven years ago and many times since. But now, thanks to National Park Service inattention, it appears doomed. Seems the Service wasn't really too serious about the plan it announced a couple of years ago to give the collection a new home while it repairs the Cliff House. Sad. First the sea lions leave, now this. Soon, there'll be nothing left seeing at Sutro Point except natural beauty and busloads of senior citizens buying cheap San Francisco sweatshirts.

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Police are baffled as to why Guyang Matthew Huang killed Tanya Holzmayer on Wednesday night during a bizarre ambush timed to the delivery of a pizza to her home in a quiet Mountain View neighborhood. He later took his own life.

This true story, as recounted above by the San Francisco Chronicle, fascinates me not because it injects the supposedly staid world of scientific research with soap-opera tragedy. No, what gets me is thinking about the poor delivery guy who was unknowingly used as a pawn so one person he didn't know could kill another. I can't help but wonder how the scars from this will color the rest of his life. First he has this probably crappy job delivering taste-free pizza, and now this. It can't do much for one's outlook. Imagine.

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