A mix between San Francisco's Diamond Dave, David Lee Roth's Diamond Dave, and Crocodile Dundee.  We can only hope to aspire to such peculiar sensibilities with age.

[Photo by The Fog Bender]

Three of Uptown Almanac's “plugged in” readers forwarded along this article from your podiatrist's waiting room rag of choice, Travel + Leisure, which—drum roll, please—anoints San Francisco the third best American city for hipsters!

Done patting yourself on the back/pointing at yourself saying, “not my damn fault”?  Okay, good.

This is amazing news to any Bay Area cool kids concerned with how they collectively stack up against other locales in the eyes of the elderly.  Only Seattle and Portland surpassed our hallowed streets, and I'm pretty sure Seattle died of a heroin overdose 15 years ago and Portland… well Portland has probably one of the best PR campaigns on television right now.  Also, who cares about Seattle and Portland?

The city which we're most often measured up against, New York City, didn't even crack the top 10.  That's right, NYC sits ugly down at the #12 spot, behind Portland (Maine), Austin, Denver, and San Juan, Puerto Rico—that last one being this biggest diss of them all.  I mean, who knew Puerto Rico was even in America, much less a tropical hipster haven?

Of course, the problem with this magazine's list is the scientific method used to make it.  Namely, they didn't use a scientific method. From the intro:

[We] ranked 35 metropolitan areas on culturally relevant features like live music, coffee bars, and independent boutiques. To zero in on the biggest hipster crowds, we also factored in the results for the best microbrews and the most offbeat and tech-savvy locals.

Basically, they defined the undefinable not by the exaggeration in their collective eye roll, but by their fancy tastes in beer, coffee, and iPhone apps?

Whatever, man.

Anyone want to take a vay-cay to Puerto Rico and scope out some off-shore hipsters?

[Pic via DIE HIPSTER SCUM]

Do you like eating? Hanging out with 30+ of your friends and neighbors? Cooking a big-ass meal without spending a dime?  Not having to leave the neighborhood?!  Well, the Wigg Party is (finally) bringing their famed Urban Eating League (UEL) out of the civility of the Lower Haight into the wilds of the Mission District and they'd be stoked for you to get involved and chow down with them.

Wigg Party MC Morgan Fitzgibbons (who you might remember from that delightfully brutal take down of C.W. Nevius' cycling journalism a few weeks back) fills us in on the details of UEL:

In case you aren't familiar, the Urban Eating League is the underground community dinner we at the Wigg Party produce. We find 5 hosts sites (homes/apartments) within walking distance of each other to cook a locally-sourced meal and create a dining experience. Then we get 30 people to sign up as Eaters ($20 a head to pay for the food) and organize them into 10 teams of 3. Each team goes to all 5 sites, sitting down with a different team at each site (there are 2 teams = 6 people at each site during all 5 rounds). After all sites have been visited, the teams grade each host site on food, creativity, hospitality and execution. We tally the scores and declare a host site champion (we line up prizes for all the hosts sites no matter how they finish) - there is also a prize for best team, as the teams are expected to have a theme, dress up, get creative, and be silly.

But as a primarily Lower Haight-based operation, the Wigg Party's network of hosts in the Mission is a little sparse, which is where you come in.  They're looking for sites between 18th-24th and Dolores-Treat (although are considering sites just outside of that range) to help with their March 25th (from 5-9pm) event.

And why would you want to host?

Lots of reasons. You get to practice/show off your culinary skills (with all the food being paid for). You get to meet 30+ fun people over the course of the evening who are all coming into your home with gratitude and trying to do their best to make you smile (singing songs and giving gifts is pretty standard from our teams of eaters). You get the thrill of competition and potentially being crowned champion (although nobody goes home without a prize - typically a gift certificate from a local merchant). AND, as a host site, you get preferred entry into future Urban Eating League events as an Eater (always a tough ticket and guaranteed to sell out).

Should you want to learn more before diving in, the SFBG wrote them up last year.  Otherwise, email Morgan directly to get involved & host a table.

Drew Hoolhorst is among of my favorite writers living in the Mission, even though dude's kinda a bro.  Bro?  Yeah, bro.

He cops to wearing J. Crew button ups and A&F and having a full-time job (which apparently means you're a bro now), yet he also wears hoodies and Ray-Bans and listens to good music and drinking in dives.  To him, this makes him a bro-ster, and he's sick of all the Marina/Mission fighting preventing him from finding a suitable neighborhood to call home.

He explains in today's Bold Italic piece:

We live in a city where everyone bitches about how one group of people is more pretentious than the other. Hipsters usually hate bro's, bro's usually hate hipsters, etc.

And that's bullshit.

Any hipster who says they hate bro's? Acts like a goddamn Mission-bro: they're dicks to everyone, they act holier-than-thou and strictly date their own kind.

Any bro who hates hipsters? Stop it. In three months you'll be wearing whatever clothes hipsters are wearing now (skinny jeans, Ray-Bans, etc.) because, deep down? You sort of like it.

Bros, hipsters … for the sake of my finding an identity in this town: can we call a truce?

I’ve seen both sides pretty regularly. We're not all that different.

We all hate Muni. We all love beer, whether we’re drinking it out of a PBR can or a red Dixie cup with a ping pong ball in it. We all seem to agree on the film Wet Hot American Summer, the show “Modern Family,” and Aziz Ansari in general.

While I always thought being 50% bro and 50% hipster just made you “a dude,” Drew does make some interesting observations about life in the city.  Do give it a read.