AP:

Members of an all-male singing group from Yale University say they were taunted with anti-gay slurs, attacked and beaten after singing “The Star Stangled Banner” at a New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco.

At least three members of the Baker’s Dozen a cappella group were hurt. One suffered a broken jaw.

No arrests have been made. Police said they are investigating.

The trouble started when a couple of partygoers began mocking the 16 student singers _ who wore sports jackets and ties _ as preppies, witnesses said.

“You’re not welcome here,” Sharyar Aziz Jr., an 18-year-old Baker’s Dozen member whose jaw was broken, quoted one partygoer as saying. “He called a few members of the group, whether it was fag or homo, very, I would say, juvenile taunting.”

Reno Rapagnani, a retired San Francisco police officer whose daughter hosted the event, shut down the party. As the singers headed back to a nearby home where they were staying, another group of young men got out of a van and jumped them, according to Rapagnani.

“They were surrounded, then tripped _ and when they were on the ground, they were kicked,” Rapagnani said.

Two other Yale students needed medical treatment following the fight, one for a concussion and the other for cuts and a swollen ankle.

Police said they arrived and found about 20 people fighting in the street. They interviewed some of the participants but let them go after taking their names.

KESQ:

There’s a growing sense of outrage among some in San Francisco over a New Year’s Eve fight in which members of a Yale University singing group was beaten and some ended up in the hospital.

As first reported by Dan Noyes of A-B-C affiliate K-G-O T-V, members of Yale’s all-male a capella group — The Baker’s Dozen — were reportedly jumped by a vehicle full of young men after they left a New Year’s Eve house party in San Francisco.

One Yale student — Sharyar Aziz — had his jaw broken in two places during the fracas. Others in the group were bloodied and bruised as well.

The party was being held at the home of Reno Rapagnani, a retired San Francisco Police Department lawyer. The trouble started at midnight after The Baker’s Dozen sang “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Witnesses say some of the local men didn’t appreciate the attention the Yale students were getting, called them derogatory names and made threats that they apparently followed up on.

The Yale Daily News has more details.

The dismal quality (“Little boxes made of ticky-tacky”) and mind-boggling prices of San Francisco area housing are famous. “They took the Earthly Paradise, and built New Jersey,” one appalled visitor recently remarked.

Ordinary people are completely priced out of this market, and the Sunday Chronicle reports the situation has inspired the traditional local activist response: Start a Web-Site!

Phil Zarboulas is mad as hell about Bay Area housing prices.

And he doesn’t want you to take it anymore.

What started as an open letter of frustration about the region’s exorbitant home values was reborn last month as www.boycotthousing.com, a Web site that urges people to stop buying Bay Area real estate, report overpriced properties and spread the word about cracked foundations, leaky roofs and rundown surroundings.

A software entrepreneur who was outbid several times during his two-year plus home search, Zarboulas admits he wants to hasten a slowdown in the market and thereby help regular folks (and himself) onto the home-ownership bandwagon.

Through the site — which seems a natural fit in the technology/real estate/advocacy-obsessed Bay Area — Zarboulas also hopes to educate overextended homeowners about the possible disadvantages of tapping equity that may not be real.

“There’s no fundamental reason why house prices are this high — it’s just a mentality,” Zarboulas, 40, said during a wide-ranging interview at a coffee shop in San Francisco. “We want to change that mentality.”

In a housing-strapped region with a population of nearly 7 million and growing, economists doubt Zarboulas’ site will have a measurable effect — not to mention the difficulty of organizing any kind of boycott on something as fragmented as a market with tens of thousands of housing sales each year.

But if even a relatively small slice of those sales are affected by his grassroots effort, Zarboulas is convinced a sense of reason could return to a market gone haywire.

Since its introduction in mid-May, almost 24,000 have visited the site and nearly 1,000 have signed up to voluntarily avoid purchasing a home in the Bay Area for some period, ranging from three months to more than a year.

Obviously, starting web-sites, signing petitions, even linking arms and singing Kumbaya, is not going to bring down Bay area home prices.

What would is what the Bay Area moonbat population would never consider for a New York minute: reducing the San Bruno Mountain-sized pile of building regulations, and opening up some of vast reservoir of safely squirreled-away “open space” where no one is permitted to build.

Unfortunately, the drastic shortage drives prices of existing homes into the stratosphere (Fido’s doghouse would go for $500K if it were on the Peninsula), and creates a gloating constituency of existing homeowners. “I’m on board, Captain, pull the ladder up,” is the real motto of the Golden State.

The SF Peninsula is not an enormously large place, but three preservation organizations alone have taken 125,000 acres, 200 square miles, of land out of circulation.

Peninsula Open Space Trust 55,000 acres

Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District 50,000 acres

Peninsula Watershed 23,000 acres

The Center for Disease Control is about to begin investigating a possibly imaginary disease called Morgellons, the first modern case of which was identified by a mother in a small town in Southwestern, Pennsylvania on the basis of a disease description in a 1690 monograph by Sir Thomas Browne.

Not altogether surprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is a hotbed of Morgellons affliction.

Morgellons Research Foundation

Today is the 100th Anniversary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, which hit at 5:12 AM, April 18, 1906. It is estimated to have hit 8.25 on the Richter scale. A devastating fire followed.

There were more than 3000 deaths, and $400,000,000.00 damages in 1906 dollars, but the city was rapidly rebullt… without federal assistance!

zpub

US Geologic Survey

SF Virtual Museum

Wikipedia

SF Chronicle Commemorative Series

Panorama of Ruins