Project Insomnia

Susan Leong stopped at nothing to find the man who stole her dog. She called police, she offered a $1,000 reward, she even hired a private investigator.

This week, thanks largely to her own persistence and sleuthing, Leong has her dog back. It's now pink, the result of an odd attempt by the thief to disguise it, but it's still her pet.

Traffic jams are as much a tradition as tailgating and heckling opposing fans when Cal and Stanford meet for their annual football rivalry. But traffic at the 106th Big Game could cause it to be remembered as the Big Backup.

Virtually no public transit service will be available to Stanford Stadium, the site of Saturday's game -- and that could make for major traffic tie-ups before and after the game.

The 70,000-plus fans expected to attend will have to make their way to the stadium without Caltrain, which won't be operating, or any special-event transit designed to haul huge crowds. Peninsula transit officials said they just couldn't afford special service to the game.

method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.

story

The San Francisco outfielder, the only player to win an MVP award more than three times, received 28 of 32 first-place votes and 426 points in balloting by the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Bonds had a difficult season in which his father, Bobby, died in August. Still, Bonds hit .341 with 45 homers and 90 RBIs, leading the major leagues in slugging percentage (.749), on-base percentage (.529) and walks.

What arouses Kal-El's mating urge? Did kryptonian women carry some subtle mating cue at appropriate times of the year? Whatever it is, Lois Lane probably didn't have it. We may speculate that she smells wrong, less like a kryptonian woman than like a terrestrial monkey. A mating between Superman and Lois Lane would feel like sodomy-and would be, of course, by church and common law.

As of Wednesday, 26 years after its launch, NASA's Voyager 1 was 8.4 billion miles (13.5 billion kilometers) from the sun. That's 90 times the distance separating the Earth from the sun.

As the robotic spacecraft continues to push far beyond the reach of the nine planets, two teams of scientists disagree whether it passed into the uncharted region of space where the sun's sphere of influence begins to wane.

Eric Chavez has won his third consecutive Gold Glove

"It seems like it's tougher every year to stay on top of your game,'' [Chavez] said. "I do whatever I can to maintain it, but now, if I don't live up to certain things, it's like I'm slacking.''

Chavez's combination of top-notch defense, power (95 homers in the past three years) and run production (100-plus RBIs each of those seasons) could translate into something unusual for the A's: a contract extension that would keep him in Oakland beyond his scheduled free agency. General manager Billy Beane has said that signing Chavez to an extension is something he'd like to do.

Look. Of course hardcore porn can be dangerous to young children. Or course it can be overly explicit and hollow and is absolutely not for kids or even certain priests. This is not an argument.

And of course the Net has helped put some truly nasty images in front of millions of children's eyeballs, and there is very little parents can do about it except deflect and restrict access and educate their kids as best they can, and hope for the best.

But maybe there are other strains, other mutations of "porn" to be wary of? Maybe there are other, far less regulated, more explicit pornographies we might want to consider, raw and darkly titillating forces hell-bent on soiling young minds and exploiting weakness and numbing the human spirit? Like, say, the pornography of McDonald's toxic foodstuffs. Or the Home Shopping Network. Or dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Or mutilated bodies and naked writhing guns and Rumsfeld's kinky black-eyed sneer.

A suspected cat hoarder wanted for allegedly jumping bail in a Sonoma County felony animal cruelty case was in a San Francisco jail cell today.

Officers arrested Marilyn Barletta, 64, at a Fisherman's Wharf hotel Monday night, police spokesman Dewayne Tully said.

Barletta is charged with felony animal cruelty for allegedly keeping 202 cats -- some of them dead -- in filthy conditions at her Petaluma home two years ago.

No company would build on a huge, active earthquake fault if it didn't have to.

'We didn't have a choice,' said Steve Sorensen, engineering coordinator for Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.

Short of running the trans-Alaska oil pipeline through Canada, Alyeska had to cross the Denali Fault, which spans almost the entire width of Alaska, to get North Slope crude oil to tidewater.

One study of 3,634 blogs found that two-thirds had not been updated for at least two months and a quarter not since Day One.

``Some would say, `I'm going to be too busy but I'll get back to it,' but never did,'' said Jeffrey Henning, chief technology officer with Perseus Development, the research company that did the study. ``Most just kind of stopped.''

Other sites die because an event came and went -- political campaigns end, the new millennium arrived without computer-generated catastrophe.

The Year 2000 site for Massachusetts still urges citizens to stock up on supplies and withdraw money in case cash machines and credit cards fail. Igor Sidorkin's personal collection of Y2K software fixes gets 30 or so visitors daily -- mostly to download patches they should have installed four years ago.

The man was on a suburban train from Grand Central Station on Wednesday night when he went to the bathroom to make a phone call, dropped the phone into the toilet bowl and then his hand and arm became stuck trying to retrieve it, officials said.

Metro-North Railroad staff could not help the man, so they stopped the train and called police officers and firefighters to extricate him, a process that took 90 minutes using "jaws of life" rescue equipment.