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Rich Santos Luckily, most of my friends don't form annoying unions with women. I feel a bit guilty because I'm a closet romantic , but some couple behavior is so annoying. Maybe as a single guy, I'm feeling bitterness outside the couple circle . Maybe if I wasn't so jaded, I'd think all this stuff was nice. But, then again, some couples seem so brainwashed. They think alike and become a federation, like people who've just joined a cult with that weird "I've now figured life out and I'm completely happy" smile on their face.

Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012. "That date has not one stitch of biblical authority," Camping says from the Oakland office where he runs Family Radio, an evangelical station that reaches listeners around the world. "It's like a fairy tale." The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011. The Mayans and the recent Hollywood movie "2012" have put the apocalypse in the popular mind this year, but Camping has been at this business for a long time.

U.S. investigators are piecing together details of an audacious new trend in drug smuggling: South American gangs are buying old jets, stuffing them full of cocaine and flying them across the Atlantic to feed Europe's growing coke habit. At least three gangs have struck deals to fly drugs to West Africa and from there to Europe, according to U.S. indictments. One trafficker claimed he already had six aircraft flying. Another said he was managing five airplanes. Because there is no radar coverage over the ocean, big planes can cross the Atlantic virtually undetected.

Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" did more than speak to me. It screamed, shouted and lectured me. It made me simultaneously laugh with empathy and cringe with embarrassment and exasperation. "This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs," the book's cover declares. "This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.

A humpback whale freed by divers from a tangle of crab trap lines near the Farallon Islands nudged its rescuers and flapped around in what marine experts said was a rare and remarkable encounter. "It felt to me like it was thanking us knowing that it was free and that we had helped it" James Moskito one of the rescue divers said Tuesday. "It stopped about a foot away from me pushed me around a little bit and had some fun." Sunday's daring rescue was the first successful attempt on the West Coast to free an entangled humpback said Shelbi Stoudt stranding manager for the Marine Mammal Center in Marin County.

Several years ago I heard about this book by some porn star that was yet to be written: It was "How to Make Love Like A Porn Star" by Jenna Jameson. The brainchild of Judith Regan and Jameson, the book was, at first, going to be a sex guide from the most famous porn star in the whole wide world. A big hit, for sure. At the time, I worked closely with a number of other sex educators and sexologists, and we all felt the pain when the book was announced. Here was yet another porn performer, one of those who do athletic and unsafe sex for a living, telling the world to use spit instead of lube (which Jameson did, notoriously)

Blue Valentine Drama. Starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. Directed by Derek Cianfrance. (R. 120 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.) Americans, puritan or libertine, conservative or liberal, tend to look at the world in moral terms. When we hear a news story or are confronted with an issue, and especially when we make a movie, our reflex is not to think, "Here is something interesting," but rather, "This is right and this is wrong, and here's why. " This tendency is so ingrained in us that we don't even notice it: You're sitting on your front porch and someone jogs by. You don't think, "There's a person jogging," but rather, "That's what I should do. " Or "Look at her showing off. " This American predilection, which is neither good nor bad, has resulted in movies that are grand social documents ("Schindler's List," "No Country for Old Men")

In its January 2011 issue, Food & Wine magazine calls Los Angeles "the best place in the country for chefs to experiment with new ideas. " San Francisco isn't even mentioned in the three cities featured in the "Where to go next" article. That's a surprise. After talking to colleagues around the country, I'd be hard-pressed to name another place generating as much excitement as the Bay Area. On both ends of the price spectrum, it feels as if trends are starting here that will eventually show up in other parts of the country.

Facebook whiz kid Mark Zuckerberg is now the United States' 35th-wealthiest person with a net worth of $6.9 billion, jumping ahead of fellow big name Bay Area residents like Apple's Steve Jobs, Google's Eric Schmidt and discount stock brokerage magnate Charles Schwab, according to Forbes magazine. The magazine released its annual Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America, topped as usual by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, with a net worth of $54 billion, and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett at $45 billion.

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy's father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. "The soldiers didn't understand. " All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery.

H ot pagan sex and lustful gods and ancient wolf goddesses and potential marriage and more sex and more than a little crazed giddy divine animal blood sacrifice. All followed by some nice light whippings administered by nearly naked grinning boy-men casual flagellations by goat-skin some joyful thrashing in the name of fertility and purity and you know sex. Ahh Valentine's Day. The original that is. Before it was called Valentine's Day back when it was called Lupercalia a big Roman festival in honor of the fertility god Lupercus before the ever-scowlin' church got a hold of this ancient and rather odd and blood-pumped Roman lust-fest co-opted it and de-sexed it stripped it of its more salacious and admittedly libertine joys as the church is so tragically wont to do. Because as everyone knows the church is nothing if not all about rigid joyless dogma and romantic abstinence and mountains of little chalky candy hearts.

A San Francisco judge ruled Tuesday that a man imprisoned for 18 years was wrongfully convicted in a double-murder case in which San Francisco authorities failed to tell the defense that they paid thousands of dollars to the star witness. Caramad Conley, 40, has been locked up since 1992 - serving two life-without-parole terms in the 1989 double slayings on Third Street that prosecutors claimed were gang-motivated. He may soon be free as a result of the ruling by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Marla Miller, who found that Conley was denied a fair trial and unconstitutionally convicted.

2006-05-14 04:00:00 PST Coronado, San Diego County -- A neat line of 177 Navy SEAL recruits link arms and wade into the sea. The day is stormy, with 7-foot breakers and 61-degree water. But instructors order them to turn and lie on their backs in the surf. The young men soak their boots, battle dress uniform trousers and white T-shirts. Their bare, crewcut heads must stay immersed as waves bat them around. Eight minutes later they rise, race to the sand dunes, drop and roll to become "sugar cookies."

Navigating past the junkies and hustlers in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, You Mi Kim found the metal security door she was looking for, and pressed the buzzer. Inside Sun Spa massage parlor, the manager saw You Mi on the surveillance camera and threw some sea salt over the threshold -- a Korean practice to ward off bad luck. It was July 2003. It had been five months since You Mi was lured from her home in South Korea by international sex traffickers, who had tricked the debt-ridden college student with promises of a high-paying hostess job in America.

I first met Penny Flame in a high-priced hotel room at the InterContinental, when she was staying in San Francisco, appearing as a star in promotion of her (then) new film, Chemistry #4. I recorded a long interview with Penny then met her, Tristan Taormino , Susie Bright and others for a post-appearance dinner. Flame was hard-edged but funny and kind; full of stories and humor about her job and the world. Later, she performed in many more films, becoming a true star and a force to be reckoned with in the world of mainstream porn, and directed a female-centered series of hardcore sex-ed videos.

A ttention, all who are reading this column right now, please put down your drink and leap up off the couch and put your pants back on and log in to Google and type the words "hot bunny terrorist fluffer banana" into the comely and world-beloved Google search engine. Do it. Do it now. Oh no wait, make it "Osama butt pancake lube explosives yay." Or better yet, try "homemade nuke porn lollipop kiddie nipple bomb!!!" (Be sure to include extra exclamation points because as we all know, Dubya isn't the brightest of presidents and these will add zing and personality to your entry and make your search terms -- the very ones the Bush administration is right now subpoenaing the Google corporation to gain access to -- really stand out to the FBI and the Department of Justice, which are always in need of a little zing)

Nominees for the 68th annual Golden Globe Awards. Motion pictures Picture, drama: "Black Swan," "The Fighter," "Inception," "The King's Speech," "The Social Network. " Picture, musical or comedy: "Alice in Wonderland," "Burlesque," "The Kids Are All Right," "Red," "The Tourist. " Actor, drama: Jesse Eisenberg, "The Social Network"; Colin Firth, "The King's Speech"; James Franco, "127 Hours"; Ryan Gosling, "Blue Valentine"; Mark Wahlberg, "The Fighter.

A 50-year-old married physician views Internet pornography for hours at home, masturbating five to seven times a day, then begins surfing porn sites at the office and risks destroying his career. A woman spends four to six hours a day in Internet chat rooms and having cybersex, and eventually starts arranging to meet online strangers for casual sex in the real world. A man spends many hours a day downloading porn, filling multiple hard drives, and devotes a separate computer just to pornography.