Friend of the Clog/CP contributor Jesse Delaney sends this photo from Santiago, Chile:

Photo | Jesse Delaney

"Philadelphia should have these."

Friday: Thanksgiving may seem close but it's actually six excruciatingly far days away. The Down Home Diner gives you your Turkey Day feast early in anticipation of Thursday's main event. Don't eat too much, though because you have an entire night of Creepy Puppet films to sit through afterward, featuring — dare we say it?! — a puppet sex tape!!! Or you can dance those extra calories off with Joker and friends at the Mausoleum. There is $2 suggested donation per ticket to save the 941 Theater. Get on it.

Saturday: This week, Kristen Humbert investigated why no one will take donations generated by the Diabolique Fetish Masquerade Ball but that doesn't mean you can't hit up yourself and help out with their new cause: Leather Heart, an org that provides emergency funds to fetishists across the land! Why don't you hit up Cut the Craft and see if there's any costume options that fit the steampunk theme?

Sunday: Please, let's not sit here and pretend you don't read the Harry Potter books, are there opening night for each movie and secretly wish you were a wizard too. So don't be embarrassed when we see each other at Harry Potter and the Magical Muggle Museum. Then get all Ron and Hermione-ly romantic at Pop Revisited where Aimee Robidoux pieces together a love story, while her partner in crim Peter Andrew Danzig sings forgotten pop songs of the '90s.

Two of Philadelphia’s best mixed martial artists will be on display tonight at Alexandra Hall. Locked in the Cage is headlined by Wilson Reis (check the CP e-trail on Reis) squaring off with Dwayne Sheldon, as well as the top-ranked 135-pound female fighter Tara LaRosa fighting Valerie Coolbraugh. Though they're both based in the area (the Brazilian Reis fights out of Jenkintown's BJJ United, while LaRosa fights out of nearby Woodstown, N.J.), neither athlete has appeared in the ring within city limits until now.

The card features three other pro fights and 12 amateur fights.

LaRosa and Reis are both top-level contenders, known for showing up; the duo alone could make the night. (Check out my Oct. '08 feature for more on Reis.)

Tickets are still available here for $45, or $65 with four 16-ounce beers. Quick math: That's 64 ounces of muscle to help you properly root on our homegrown bloodletters.

The show starts at 7:30 p.m. at at Alexandra Hall in Sherman Mills, 3510 Scotts Lane in East Falls.

It's been a long 24 hours of bike news in Philly.

Yesterday morning, Councilmembers Jim Kenney and Frank DiCicco co-sponsored and introduced laws aimed at greater enforcement and regulation of bicycles. One would would raise the penalties by jaw-dropping factors (a hundredfold, in one case) for bicycle infractions and require bicycles to register and carry license plates in the city.

To the latter, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia — which has been a consistent voice in calling for bicycles to obey traffic laws — offered on its blog a very interesting case study in what's happened when other cities tried to introduce similar laws. Spoiler alert: They repealed them because they didn't work.

But the former bill, the penalty-raising one, has some interesting quirks, as well. For one thing, it may effectively outlaw many fixed-gear bikes.

You see, Philadelphia's and Pennsylvania's bicycle regulations differ slightly. One difference: the definition of "brakes."

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Case you haven't heard...

Click above to see the rules and requirments.

Bicyclists, take heed: The Philadelphia Police announced today that officers will be launching the slightly-terrifyingly-named "Central Bicycle Enforcement Initiative" at Rittenhouse Square.

What, if anything, the timing has to do with today's proposal by Councilmembers Jim Kenney and Frank DiCicco for rather draconian bike enforcement laws, I don't know. But there it is.

I received two press releases about the "initiative." One came from the police. It read:

Tomorrow Friday, November 19, 2009, the Central Bicycle Enforcement Initiative will begin at 1:00PM at Rittenhouse Square.  Members of the Bicycle Coalition will be on hand to help with the education on bike laws, rules and safety. Hand-out material will be provided.

The other came from the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. It was a little more involved.

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Don't know if you saw this little thingamajigger on Phawker, (which itself links to this thing from Washington City Paper), but our Police Commissioner may have a  truthiness problem from his days down in DC. From the WashCP:

An affidavit filed today in U.S. District Court raises questions as to whether former D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey may have committed perjury in his sworn testimony about the Pershing Park fiasco. Ramsey had repeatedly stated in depositions that he had not ordered the mass arrest of approximately 400 people during the Sept. 27, 2002, World Bank/IMF protests.

Yet the affidavit, by Det. Paul Hustler, a 22-year D.C. Police veteran, maintains that Ramsey indeed ordered the arrests.

Hustler's affidavit, taken Nov. 16, [PDF] is just the latest shock in a pair of Pershing Park class-action civil suits in U.S. District Court. In recent months, the case has been dogged by allegations of massive discovery violations. Judge Emmet Sullivan has called for an outside investigation into how basic evidence in the cases had gone missing.

We took a quick read through Hustler‘s testimony, and indeed, if he’s telling the truth, it might not bode well for Chief Ramsey. So, being the judicious reporters that we are, we (technically, an intern) placed a call to Ramsey’s public affairs office, to ask if he had any thoughts on Hustler’s statement. Here's what the lady who answered the phone told us, in whole:

“We're not willing to comment, and neither is he!� Click.

So, um, there you go.

This morning, Councilmembers Jim Kenney and Frank DiCicco introduced legislation aimed at reining in bicyclists.

The particulars: Three bills were introduced today, two as an either-or pair.

Councilman Kenney introduced two bills (co-sponsored by Councilman DiCicco) that each seek to increase fines for riding on the sidewalk (from $10 to $300), wearing headphones (from $3 to $300), and riding without brakes (a $1,000 penalty in one bill; confiscation in the other).

Councilman DiCicco introduced one bill (co-sponsored by Councilman Kenney) that would require all riders to register their bikes with the city (at a fee of $20), and mount license plates on their bikes. The penalty for not doing so would be $100.

The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia – which has been a vocal advocate for bikers' following traffic laws – has voiced its opposition to these bills.

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Julia Harte with your morning fix.

A Chester county boy with diabetes and his parents filed for a "due process" hearing with his middle school after school officials refused to let the boy attend gym class more frequently than other kids to keep his blood sugar low.

The Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides health insurance to children in low-income families, would be phased out by the House health overhaul bill, which would instead direct such children either to Medicaid or to a national health insurance exchange.

Beijing's poorest residents were still seeking medical care from illicit "black clinics," even after the government shut down 3,300 of the illegal medical centers last year.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai must show "measurable results" of his efforts to fight corruption and cronyism and improve the Afghan army before he can expect to receive future civilian aid from the United States, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed Karzai yesterday.

Political contributions from the U.S.-Cuba Democracy political action committee reached some lawmakers in the House of Representatives days before they voted against closer ties with Cuba -- a sharp reversal of their previous positions.

Since there has been no inflation in cost-of-living expenses over the past year -- in fact, a net deflation of 0.14 percent -- Pennsylvania state lawmakers' salaries were frozen at $78,315 this month.

WHYY's Susan Phillips reports today that State Senator Larry Farnese and State Representative Mike O'Brien are both calling on the state to tell Foxwoods its time is up.

Said Sen. Farnese:

They should shut the door on this and we should move forward. And the city of Philadelphia should move forward on this. I think its a bad idea to try and give them additional time. Because they've never convinced anybody and they've never done anything to prove they can do what they say they're gonna do.

Yesterday, the Inquirer's Jennifer Lin broke the news on a buried clause in a proposed amendment to the amazingly pernicious table games bill that would give Foxwoods yet another extension to get up and running.

The casino actually just got an extension in August, giving it another two years to open. This amendment would have allowed it to take yet another year.

But Foxwoods appears to be in serious financial difficulty. They've been unable to find sufficient funding for their South Philly waterfront location; and, the AP reports today that Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut just announced that they'd be defaulting on a debt payment, prompting Standard and Poor's to lower their credit rating to a 'D.'

Why, then, do there seem to be efforts afoot in Harrisburg to help the faltering casino afloat?

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

A bill extending statewide hate-crimes legislation to protect gays, women and the disabled passed its first vote in the Pennsylvania General Assembly and was expected to pass in the House, though it may have more trouble in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Climate change will affect women in developing countries worst, because they do most of the agricultural work around the world and are hence most vulnerable to weather-related natural disasters, the United Nations Population Fund reported.

Half of all children in the United States will be on food stamps at some point in their lives, according to a new United States Department of Agriculture report. Forty-three percent of individuals receiving food stamps in Philadelphia are children.

CT scans of 22 Egyptian mummies several thousand years old, mostly priests or courtiers, show that they suffered from hardened arteries -- proving the condition isn't unique to modern humans, according to the cardiologist who headed the study.

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient fire pit and a variety of small tools from 3,500 years ago on the grounds where the SugarHouse casino is slated to be built, in what constitutes the largest single discovery of Native American artifacts in Philadelphia. When the dig is over, the site will become a parking lot for the casino.

Photo | HannahLa (now and always backlogged

Shaft

This installment of Stars of the Photostream comes from HannahLa (now and always backlogged), who writes of this photo of the just-imploded Drexel Shaft:

Originally, it was the clouds that caught my attention.
The graffiti that's not naughty says "grand is my hair to climb."
In memory of the Drexel Shaft.
(see photos of its final moments by Contrabass www.flickr.com/photos/contrabass/4106301967/ and relaxing www.flickr.com/photos/relaxing/4108339892/ )

Submit your Philly photo to City Paper’s photostream here.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

Australian officials invented and issued a new fire alert, "catastrophe" level, to urge residents of South Australia to immediately evacuate their houses and avoid the deaths of people who linger when fires hit, trying to protect their property.

A 6-foot-high cross was burned outside the home of a white Western Pennsylvania family, after their black foster son's high school football team lost a game.

The recession was smoothing historically tense relations between the white and black populations of an Atlanta, Ga., suburb, as job losses and economic hardship indiscriminately sent residents to welfare offices and food stamp lines.

President Obama's bow to Japan's Emperor Akihito over the weekend was provoking outraged online commentary, mainly from conservatives, who thought it looked like Obama was groveling to the foreign leader.

Several groups, including the N.A.A.C.P. and A.F.L.-C.I.O., were preparing to join together and call on Obama to create more jobs, specifically by spending more on schools and roads and financially relieving state and local governments to prevent more layoffs.

319 more employees in Pennsylvania state agencies will be laid off, announced Governor Rendell yesterday, bringing the total number of state government layoffs this year to 769.

First, of all, there's a Toy Hall of Fame?

Apparently it's been around for 11 inductions, and the Ball as a toy was finally inducted.

John Stewart comments, hilarity ensues.

And here it is, the felling of that great, phallic, whatever the fuck it was, for your viewing pleasure, courtesy of some guy with a YouTube account.