How does the young mayor of a new-age left coast city cope with a major political setback? By disappearing for days on end with his all-important "life coach," as failed gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom is rumored to have done.

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums owes $239,000 in back taxes, according to press reports. He follows in the footsteps of other local mayors, who variously killed a guy with a car; were convicted of theft; and boned an aide's wife.

Other cities may have their fair share of criminal mayors (we're looking at you Detroit!) but the Bay Area is quickly making its case as the home of the most comically criminal municipal leaders. Let's take a tour.

Gavin Newsom loves Twitter. The San Francisco mayor is convinced his hometown microblogging service will change the world. How heartbreaking it must be, then, to read that a key Twitter coder can't wait to escape his "filthy... disastrous" town.

The annual pilgrimage of Bay Area pyromaniacs to a Nevada desert playa is over; now comes the inevitable Burning Man hangover, in which participants and haters alike bemoan the bacchanal's worst excesses.

Tired of hearing tech bloggers opine authoritatively about politics, a subject they know nothing about but nevertheless retain strongly held views? That was so September 2008. Welcome to the next blogosphere megatrend: Tech bloggers opining authoritatively about the economy.

TWITTER IS DOWN NOW IT'S NOT OH MY GOD. A nightmare in screenshots!

This is just so busted, where do I begin? I needed somewhere to duck into downtown to work for an hour before going to Marissa Mayer's favorite hair salon. There's Wi-Fi there, but that's a bonus: not a reason to camp out. Even bloggers have boundaries. But not this guy, who actually worked from the cafe I ended up in on what looks like a laptop with a broken screen. Instead of replacing the laptop — these are lean times after all — he just brought his own external monitor.And pro headphones, and a backup keyboard, too:

Sidewalk graffiti at 18th and Dolores in San Francisco's hipster-heavy Mission district. (Photo by Melissa Gira Grant)

Time magazine gives renewable energy credit to hunky God-mayor Gavin Newsom. None was due. The august journal hails our fair mayor for a nonexistent wind-energy installation:

So that's what those things are. The box in the photo holds equipment for AT&T's U-verse cable service. The grumpy guy is David Crommie, president of the Cole Valley Improvement Association. He's torqued because AT&T got an exemption from environmental review requirements to install up to 850 of these things around the city. You'll also see smaller green boxes on city sidewalks — those are Comcast's. Verizon manages to bury all its equipment underground. The CVIA has stalled AT&T's plans, but the San Francisco Daily Post reports that "AT&T is now expected to reapply for exemption." (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Protesters angry at what they call the "recruitment of children" through the U.S. Army-sponsored America's Army videogame plan to meet in San Francisco's South Park at noon. It's a safe bet they'll march over to game developer Ubisoft on 3rd Street. This being San Francisco, the only real news from the event will be a counterprotest.

I'm a hundred pages into Anathem (accent on first syllable), Neal Stephenson's forthcoming thousand-page novel about Fraa Erasmus, a young man who lives in a millennia-old monastery devoted not to religion, but to science, math and philosophy. They have no Web 2.0. It's convincing enough that I already want to stuff your Twitter feed up your nose. Why? (I promise: No spoilers and nothing not already leaked in the promo materials.)By banishing computers from their lives, Erasmus's reclusive colleagues are able to nourish what he calls "attention surplus disorder," the ability to focus on and think about one thing for a long time. Erasmus's order passes its trains of thought from generation to generation — a Church of the Long Now. By contrast, the video and telecom-addled civilization that bustles outside their walls is full of shallow and incorrect knowledge. People who've never taken time to study anything feel they know everything. Constantly distracted by their jangling electronic gizmos, they can't comprehend the powerful ideas and complex systems wrought by thousands of years of civilization. Their smart machines make them dumb. Inevitably, they look to the cloistered nerds to save them. I've pledged not to do a review until September 9th, but I'll tell you Stephenson's worldview is contagious from page one. It's been following me around in the real world — I haven't hated normal people this much since I was an MIT freshman. You say you're a "geek?" Let's see you unplug your iPhone for a month. Surely you have something more interesting to do.

"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization" is the new cover story from Adbusters. If you're not familiar, Adbusters is a fun, angry, Starbucks-hating publication whose credo states that we've all been brainwashed by advertising and mass media into an orgy of overconsumption that lets the American Empire destroy the rest of the world to feed our fat faces. I buy it at Whole Foods.

Here we go again. New graffiti on the sidewalk at 18th and Dolores claims nothing short of "Mission Exploitation" by Google employees. A decade ago, the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project posted flyers urging Valencia Street's self-styled "artists" to vandalize luxury cars. Some did. In 2008, most Web 2.0 workers aren't rich enough to draw the righteous anger of their slightly-less-privileged neighbors. Except for Googlers who dare move into the city's youth-culture ghetto between Cesar Chavez and Market.

GottaPark is the site many a Bay Area resident has wished for: A meeting place where people seeking parking spots can hook up with people who have parking space to rent. What the site needs: A primer on how this would affect my income tax return.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Susie Cagle went in search of that most elusive of user-generated content — actual good times at a Web 2.0 event. Her target: CupcakeCamp, a "crowd-sourced" bakeoff where Internet cool kids took pictures of one another eating cupcakes.

That's it, I'm leaving. And I'm taking the hot ones with me. Women of the Internet, it's time to go. It's dangerous online for us in tech. As long as we were moderating "coping with cutting" LiveJournals and keeping Zappos rich by shoe shopping, the Valley and the men who made it paid us little mind. But if we dare be more than pretty eyeballs driving the market, we must challenge the deep misogyny pulsing at the heart of the hypertext transfer protocol. Consider this a collective Swiftian kick to the panties. Follow me, for this is why we have no hope here:

It would be pegged to "BULLSHIT" the entire time. [MSNBC]