le.chicken.farmer@yahoo.com

IN THE GAME In a pink dress, with a pink hair tie and those little pink sneakers that light up every time you take a step, she dominated the Alameda High School hardwood. I'm going to guess she was three. How else to explain the dogged determination with which, time after time after time, she took aim at the far-away hoop, and with all her cute-little-cutey-pie might heaved the basketball to a point about a foot-and-a-half in front of her feet. Bounce, plop, and roll ...Read more »

caitlin@sfbg.com

MAY 25-26

Carnaval Parade: Starts at 24th St. and Bryant, SF. Sun/26, 9:30am, free; Festival: Harrison between 16th and 24th Sts., SF. Sat/25-Sun/26, 10am-6pm, free. www.carnavalsf.com. The Mission's most colorful processional and music fest had to change hands this year to avoid financial ruin. Show your delight at its survival by showing up in force for the samba, sequins, and spectacle.

MAY 30-JUNE 5Read more »

IN THE GAME It's not kickball; it's matball. Which looks a lot like kickball, with one big difference: You can have more than one runner at a time on any given base. You can have up to three, but if a fourth is incoming, someone's got to go.

You don't have to stop running, either, when you reach home, in some versions of the game. You can keep going — back to first, and around the bases again. In gym class, this was a way to make kids run laps without quite exactly knowing it.Read more »

Y'all chose Shameless as your top small biz of the year, so I'm going to yield the floor for a moment to someone who voted for the photography outfit:

"Shameless is a female-owned and run business that promotes positive body image and self love while creating spectacular pin-up and boudoir images," wrote one enraptured Bay Guardian reader. "Women (myself included) leave the studio feeling more beautiful and accepting of their bodies."Read more »

I cannot help but insert italics into Babette Pinsky quotes, bear with me.

"It didn't dawn on me that I shouldn't open a business by myself."

"It was sort of survival for a really long time."

"We have to show things the way we want them."

Perhaps such signs of effusiveness are befitting for one of the Bay's more experienced purveyors of fashion.Read more »

What's been San Francisco's go-to cold 'n creamy treat for the past 85 years? No, its not Dianne Feinstein. It's It's-It, that native warm weather snack, created on a deliciously fateful day in 1928 when George Whitney squished a scoop of vanilla ice cream between two big oatmeal cookies and dipped the resulting sandwich into dark chocolate. For more than four decades, Whitney sold his It's-Its at Playland-at-the-Beach, until that legendary local amusement park was demolished in the 1970s. Read more »

The R & G Lounge has been a fixture in San Francisco's Chinatown for 28 years. Taking up three floors with a seating capacity of 225, it's served as the backdrop for many a wedding rehearsal dinner, birthday celebration, and other special occasion bashes. But it isn't just heartwarming memories of being surrounded by friends and family with a pleasant Tsingtao buzz that linger in diners' minds. Just as often, it's the taste of the establishment's signature seafood plate: salt and pepper live Dungeness crab.Read more »

The folks at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies were locavores before the fancy foodies ever created that word. They were talking about a new economy more than a decade ago — and their vision involves networks that are human, not just electronic.

BALLE is the heart of the movement for localism, for building economies based on communities.

Founded in 2001 by Judy Wicks, who owned a restaurant in Philadelphia, and Laury Hammel, who owned a group of sports clubs in Boston, the group has expanded to a national operation with one of its two main offices in Oakland.Read more »

When Jaime Maldonado's dad Gabriel opened the family's corner bakery in 1951, it was the only Latino-owned business on 24th Street. In the years since, the story of La Victoria and its famous pan dulce has become, more or less, the story of the Mission District.Read more »

Would there have been a better time for an explicitly gay sports bar to open in SF than late 2012? You can bet your sweet basketballs there would not. First the Giants win the World Series, packing Castro's spanking new Hi Tops with fans eager for some specialty drafts, juicy burgers, and same-sex camaraderie. The Niners hit the Super Bowl, and a groundbreaking pic of kissing male fans in Hi Tops' gorgeously retro ball-court-locker room interior runs in Sports Illustrated. Read more »