Most people don’t go from lying by the roadside with a broken pelvis and a severed leg to landing a role on “Sons of Anarchy” in six years. South San Francisco native Kurt Yaeger isn’t most people.
Yaeger, who wears a prosthetic leg, plays Greg the Peg on the show’s fifth season, debuting Sept. 11 on FX. Unlike many disabled television characters — think Becky Jackson on “Glee” or Walter White Jr. on “Breaking Bad” — Greg’s disability is downplayed.
“He’s pretty much like the rest of the guys — a cold-blooded, murdering bad fella,” Yaeger says.
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Many more black and Hispanic sophomores in San Francisco public schools passed the high school
exit exam in 2012 than in prior years, but those gains didn’t necessarily occur at the schools receiving extra resources to help minorities succeed.
Among Hispanic 10th-graders, 66 percent passed the math portion of the California High School Exit Exam, up from 60 percent in 2011. And 70 percent passed the English-language portion, up from 62 percent in 2011, according to data from the California Department of Education.
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Superstars such as Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn have had some unlikely co-stars in their films: San Francisco public schools. A number of films have been shot on local campuses, including “Hemingway and Gellhorn” and “Milk.” Although such projects earn the San Francisco Unified School District $880,000 a year, the majority of school-site filming is for advertising and corporate videos, which are not eligible for city programs intended to lure film crews here.
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Plans for a new 47-story building at the corner of Third and Mission streets could inject new life into the Mexican Museum’s long hunt for a permanent home — if traffic and the proposed tower’s massive shadows don’t get in the way.
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Locals could be forgiven for thinking San Francisco legend Janis Joplin had returned from the grave to sing the blues with Royal Thunder. The Atlanta-based quartet brings its sultry, bluesy metal to the Bottom of the Hill on Tuesday. Anchoring Royal Thunder’s sound is bassist and vocalist Mlny (pronounced “Melanie”) Parsonz, whose rough-hewn pipes echo Joplin in languorous moments and Joan Jett when the band kicks it into gear.
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All over town, folks are tuning out the world and tuning in to their smartphones — playing games, checking email, sending text messages. They’re also making themselves sitting ducks for robbery.
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The Bay Area may be known for Silicon Valley’s innovations, but it was another breakthrough altogether that gave it a permanent spot on the international heavy-metal map: thrash.
The early years of such seminal local bands as Metallica, Exodus, Testament, Death Angel and Vio-lence — plus their Los Angeles brethren Megadeth and Slayer — are captured in the new photo book “Murder in the Front Row:
Shots From the Bay Area Thrash Metal Epicenter,” by Harald Oimoen and Brian Lew, out this week.
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The author of the humor memoirs “Alternadad,” “Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude” and recently self-published “Jewball,” a novel based on the adventures of Jewish basketball leagues in the 1930s, will appear at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center today at 7 p.m.
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Rita Kearns lies back as her midwife measures her gravid belly. Maria Iorillo presses a fetoscope to Kearns’ side and finds the baby’s heartbeat. “It’s perfect,” she says, passing Kearns the earpieces.
Kearns, 43, is 41 weeks pregnant — one week past her due date. By now, many obstetricians would suggest inducing labor. Iorillo is content to wait. And, when the contractions begin, Kearns will give birth at home, as she’s done twice before.
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Maxwell Wallace, a 17-year-old Lowell High School senior, was elected by his peers to represent students on the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education this year.
Were you surprised your peers picked you? Obviously it’s a great honor, but I think they made the right decision, because I have qualifications. I was an intern with [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s office for a summer and I worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
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The family of a woman killed by a falling redwood branch in Stern Grove last April is suing The City on the grounds that the tree was a known hazard, attorneys for the family said Tuesday.
Resident Kathleen Bolton was loading her car in the grove’s concert meadow parking lot April 14 when the branch fell onto the car, crushing it and killing her.
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The City’s public golf courses could earn significantly more money if they were turned over to private management, according to a long-awaited study that critics say is based on faulty fiscal and demographic information.
The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department operates six golf courses, ranging from the carefully manicured Harding Park — which hosts the PGA Tour — to the scruffy Lincoln Park, which boasts views of the Golden Gate Bridge.
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The Recreation and Park Department knows that nearly 140 of its facilities are contaminated by lead, but it says a tight budget means it will be years before cleanup is completed.
City agencies are required by the Department of Public Health to remove lead from buildings constructed before 1978. Recreation and Park fell behind, and in 2003, the department was required to step up its efforts and report quarterly to the Board of Supervisors on its progress, said Karen Cohn, a children’s health manager at DPH.
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Walgreens’ legal fight to continue selling cigarettes at stores in San Francisco places the drugstore chain’s financial interests ahead of the health of The City’s residents, the City Attorney’s Office argued in a brief filed Thursday.
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Literary agent Elise Proulx is also the executive director of San Francisco's LitQuake, which runs this year Oct. 3-11. How has LitQuake evolved since its beginning? In 2002, it was a two-day festival and we only had a few events at the library and nearby venues, and to us it seemed like frantic activity. Now it’s around 20 times bigger.
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