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Need something a bit more, you know, sexy and subversive this holiday? Here you go - No fruit baskets. No swell digital cameras and no "Sopranos" DVD sets and no noxious copies of "High School Musical 2" and no "Eat, Pray, Love" and nothing at all approved or endorsed by Oprah. No golfing figurines. No sports paraphernalia. No candleholders. No pink fleece hoodies with little glittery skulls. Not on this, my annual list, anyway. Just random delicious deeply cool things I've come across that make a statement or warm your blood or taste unreal or that serve some sort of...

Remember kids: Be good, say your prayers and, uh, never be alone with a priest. Praise! This is how you know. This is one more of the beautiful bizarre myriad ways the Great Shift signals its imminent arrival, in fits and spurts and wayward sidelong slaps, weird cultural burps and from unexpected places that make you go, wow. Take the Archdiocese of New York. It has apparently just released new coloring book for kids, all about how to be safe in an age of fear and predation. It is full of nice pictures of kids being sweet and virginal and...

Note to radical Muslims: I've now named my favorite coffee mug 'Muhammad.' Hope that helps -Here's what I like to do every time I see a throng of frothing religious zombies marching in the streets of Sudan or Pakistan or Colorado Springs or anywhere else in the world, carrying knives and torches and holding festering clots of fear in their hearts as they burn flags or photographs or copies of "The Goblet of Fire" or "The Golden Compass" or that sweet little book about the cute gay penguins in the Central Park Zoo and all screaming for the instant death...

Shrill Bible-thumpers boycott 'The Golden Compass'; world's children grin devilishly -It has become some sort of rule, some sort of perfectly delicious law of the popular culture upon which any open-minded and attuned and humor-licked and spiritually aware and intellectually curious and sexually alive human worth her moist, wine-massaged soul can now rely with utter and perfect clarity. . . .

America's most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true! Is this why they hate us? Why we hate ourselves? Is this why we seem to have no real idea who the hell we are anymore, or what it means to have a humane and thoughtful national identity, and therefore we happily scratch and claw and fight our way into giant fluorescent-lit hellpits for a chance at a $29 DVD player and some crappy plasma TVs and a pallet of heavily discounted spatulas? More broadly: Is this why we're suffering such a general feeling of...

It's official: Less than one year until history slaps Dubya to the curb. Can you feel the tingle? It's just that kind of feeling, that sense of hesitant, embryonic optimism, the sense that says, oh my God, we as a culture and a smash-mouthed, war-hammered society really are fast approaching something possibly, potentially, heart-achingly new and different and — because it cannot get any worse — just a little bit better. Here is my suggestion: Mark your calendars, set your watch, program a celebratory ringtone well in advance, because the countdown has officially begun. It is now less than one...

Are you sick of being sick? Suffering way too much Bush-induced nausea? Well, tough -- I know how it is. You've had it up to here. There are only so many stories about blood and death and pain you can take, only so many times you can hear about random shootings and corporate malfeasance and how BushCo's squad of scabrous flying monkeys have, say, supported torture or endorsed wiretapping or gouged the nation for another $200 billion to pay for a failed war. Your nerves are raw and your heart is tired and the media will just not shut the...

Behold, the most dangerous issue facing modern faith: Its inability to evolve, nakedly - It's a topic that jumped up like a stunned ferret from God's own hot plate three separate times recently — indicating, I think, that I'd better pay some sort of attention to it — the topic being the obvious but still desperately under-discussed idea that perhaps the most dangerous problem facing man in this modern age of radical technology and dazzling scientific conundrum and otherworldly raspberry vodka and ever-expanding notions of love and sex and human interconnection is the sad and treacherous fact that, well, religion...

Bloody nation cheers 4th straight title. Afghanistan sulks. "I'm speechlost!" sniffled Bush -- Hot on the heels of Time magazine naming the Apple iPhone "Invention of the Year" and just as many newspapers, blogs and TV programs prepare to unleash their various "Top 10" and "Best Of" lists for 2007, comes the news that you, your ravaged and saddened heart, and the world at large have all just awarded George W. Bush's disastrous, embarrassing, profoundly disgusting occupation of Iraq "War of the Year," for the fourth consecutive year.

Go ahead, roll in it. Revel in it. You're made of it. What, you prefer a meek, sterile world? I'm 2 or 3 years old. I'm out in the backyard playing in the grass and my dad is just over there, working in the garden, planting tomatoes or carrots or human shrunken heads or God knows what because how the hell should I know, I'm only 3. Like any self-respecting child, I like to dig in the dirt with my bare hands, probe, investigate the planet I currently cruise so close to. It pays off nicely. I eventually find real...

To hell with the FBI's million-strong Terrorist Watch List. Here is your killer alternative -- Somewhere deep in the bowels of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center which is naturally connected by a series of secret, rotting, subterranean vacuum tunnels to the National Security Agency and the Homeland Security Department and Dick Cheney's nipple-torture fetish room, is a vicious little computer bank running an encephalitic version of Microsoft Vista that's right now churning through some sort of satanic algorithm designed to mine enormous piles of chaotic data from a million unreliable global sources, all in an effort to add tens of...

Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history - I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career. And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their...

Does the extremism of some progressives spell danger to delicious evolution? Well, yes. I hear it nearly every week in response to nearly any column that has anything to do with me daring to say I appreciate or admire or moderately wish to commend some sort of progressive movement or corporation or product, one that appears to be creating some sort of good in the world, moving things forward or upending the status quo or infuriating the religious right and making you think/shop/screw anew. I get the e-mails. And there is, by and large, a general outpouring of agreement, understanding,...

Showdown! White-trash diva versus mercenary war thugs. Who rapes your spirit more? The ever-present and understandable and yet still rather whiny complaint goes something like this: Dear (SFGate/Chronicle/horribly biased corporate media outlet du jour): Hey, why the hell don't you people feature more serious news on your front page? Why do you always insist on highlighting the latest trash diva slut whore celeb meltdown rehab tale over more dire and heady and serious fare, like, say, the repulsive story of those BushCo-sucking Blackwater thugs killing innocent people in Iraq as the company's chief executive smirks at Congress and actually defends...

Larry Craig's bathroom stall! Haggard's meth hotel! See all the sites of GOP shame. Fun for kids! Tourists are flocking to see the bathroom in the Minneapolis airport where U.S. Sen. Larry Craig was arrested in a sex sting. "It's become a tourist attraction," said Karen Evans, who staffs the information counter at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. "People are taking pictures." -Associated Press Kids! Families! War-wary countrymen! Adorable schoolchildren! Hungry to see the real America? Love the idea of a crazy road trip across our fine 'n' scandalous land, one in which you get a real taste of just...

Behold, an extraordinary event, the most astonishing speech you will hear all year -- It was one of those surreal, suspended moments, an unexpected little hiccup in the otherwise bleak sociopolitical continuum where you couldn't help but pause and gasp and sit back and let your bitter cynicism and your hard-won ennui fall away and actually allow yourself, for now, just this once, really and truly believe what you were seeing. Could it really be happening? Was there really any way in hell a straight white male BushCo-era Republican would dare step up to a live microphone in front of...

Praise Jesus, it's the collapse of evangelical Christian rule in America. Rejoice! Oh yes, by all means please take a moment to look around, ye who might be feeling a bit hopeful and optimistic right now.

Who, pray who, is still sucked in by grotesque fast-food ads? Shouldn't there be a law? I admit scattershot naivete. I admit to a strain of blind optimism, a sort of sporadic myopia, a weirdly sanguine tunnel vision that makes me somehow think that we as a species and a culture and as a mad gaggle of individual human souls who are coupled with functioning hunks of semi-rational gray matter, we must, at least occasionally, be learning something, ever-so-slightly advancing our awareness of those things on this planet that want to harm us and sicken us and even kill us,...

A war that isn't really a war, the great humiliation that's ours forever. Is there any upside? We are, of course, mostly fighting against ourselves. It must be repeated every so often, just as a painful, necessary, ego-tweaking reminder: Iraq was never a war. Not really, not in any sense that mattered or that we could actually define and understand or to which we could truly submit ourselves or our national identity. It never mattered how many little American flags appeared on how many bloated Chevy Avalanches, how many right-wing radio shows found a new reason to pule, how many...

Nothing like returning from vacation to the dulcet sounds of hardcore street violence, no? And what a lovely day it was, all sunshine and 70 degrees and a light San Francisco breeze, most of the city away for Labor Day weekend and the rest at Burning Man and anyone who was left pretty much feeling that groovy and mellow and relaxed vibe you can only get when the city's volume is dialed way down to a low, even gentle roar. It was a feeling that fully included me, having just returned from a lovely, remote, four-day getaway up in Alaska,...