If you try to rob your food delivery person, you will be found. You will be punished. And we will link to the story on the Beehive.

Here's what can happen when you assault your pizza delivery driver. If you're a driver, by the way, the Association of Pizza Delivery Drivers has your back.

Robert Rodriguez reports in today's Business section that Fresno's on yet another list -- Forbes' annual ranking of the best places for business and careers. Unfortunately, we're almost at rock bottom overall -- 145 out of 150 cities (Visalia comes in at 148). But Rodriguez points out that both cities did relatively well in job growth (Fresno made 19th place, Visalia 22nd).

Buckle up or pay up, says the Fresno Office for Traffic Safety. More than 1,000 citations have been given out in Fresno to folks not wearing seatbelts in the car over the past 10 days, the police department says.

Grant Morris is not excited about junebug season:

Around June, we get these evil flying beetles that are orange and have black stripes on their backs. Here in Fresno we call them Junebugs. And they usually are gone by July, so the name fits.

Anyway, they're extremely clumsy and famous for flying into girls' hair. In fact, that's probably the only cool thing about them. No, I take that back. If you toss them into campfires they quickly fly back out, only they're all on fire so that makes them pretty cool, too. But they're still evil. They have flag-like antennae and if you poke them they hiss.

Good news, Grant. Junebugs apparently make a very nutritious snack.

If you've been paying attention to local news recently, you know a group of Fresno's City Council members are in Vegas this week talking up downtown. The occasion is the International Council of Shopping Centers' spring convention, and the council members want to attract retailers to a development in the area south of Grizzlies Stadium. The city's partner in this enterprise is Forest City Enterprises, half-owner of The Marketplace at River Park, whose representatives are also down in Vegas helping the council members lure those merchants in.

Missed Sudz in the City last Saturday? Catch a video glimpse of the first part of the evening, from the Beehive. RealPlayer required.

Look for an interview Rick Bentley held with Amber Frey and her lawyer Gloria Allred in tomorrow's Bee. Tomorrow night at 9 p.m., CBS premieres the made-for-TV drama Amber Frey: Witness for the Prosecution of Scott Peterson. In the interview, Frey will talk about her plans to get back to her former life in Fresno, and about the effects of her relationship with Peterson on her life and the lives of others.

Update: Here's the interview.

A survey by Salary.com (not Men's Health this time) says that Fresno is the ninth least affordable place to live for paycheck earners. Contrary to the popular wisdom that Fresno's an economic haven from the Bay Area blues, the Salary.com survey suggests coastal refugees can do slighly better in Oakland, Modesto or Orange County, and much better in Sacramento, San Bernardino or Riverside.

The Time Sink is a photoblog created and maintained by Clovite Dan Bowman. Dan says he usually wanders around his Clovis neighborhood with a Minolta Dimage camera in hand, looking for good shots of flora and fauna, with the occasional majestic landscape thrown in for good measure. Every now and then, he adds a touch to a photo that makes it just a little bit breathtaking. He says he started the site in 2000, posting a photo every now and then, before he turned it into an all-out photoblog in '03. Check it out for your semi-regular beauty fix.

Speaking of online communities, Mike Oz has an article in today's Life section about the promotional mileage locals bands are getting from MySpace.

The Daily Planet, a longtime staple of the Tower District, is packed tonight for the last time. Tonight, the restaurant will be closing its doors. A post on Mindhub yesterday broke the news and a visit to the restaurant confirmed it. No more prix fixe dinners? Sad.

Update: Joan Obra's got the deets.

Two years ago, during a City Council meeting on funding for the Human Relations Commission, councilmember Jerry Duncan infamously e-mailed to a staff member (PDF) the remark, "If I had one dirty bomb and I could eliminate all the liberals in Fresno at once." After the ensuing fury, Duncan apologized several times, and life went on. Last year, Duncan supported (or, more accurately, failed to oppose) reducing funding for the Human Relations Commission from almost $200K to $35K, eliminating the Commission's two staff members. "We're not getting rid of it at this point," Duncan said at the time. "There's been no conversation about that."

This year, Duncan proposes reducing that $35,000 to $0. He wants the money moved to the Parks and Recreation Department. No word on what the rest of the council thinks, but this is only the least of the drama in John Ellis' wrap-up of the current state of the 2006 city budget.

Local Web guru and Mindhub founder Suzanne Bertz-Rosa has a column in today's opinion section, tagging to many of the efforts to organize Fresno's hipsters online. She mentions Mindhub, Creative Fresno, Fresno Famous, FLYP, and Craigslist, as well as some of the other happenings in the community that wired Fresniks probably already know about. Dig around a bit online and you'll find some other sites as well, like Souls and Sounds (created by The Bee's own Raina LeGarreta), forums like the ones at CentralCali.com, 559 Hangout and SonicFoundation.net, and online communities like the LiveJournal crowd.

Among the best things about the Web is how easy it is to find or create hubs for people who share your interests, whether you're a Commodore 64 enthusiast or a bird-watcher. Check out sites like the previously-mentioned MeetUp.com , or search the Web for fellow-travelers. If you don't find anything, start it up. No matter how esoteric you think your interests are, you can almost assuredly use the Internet find someone nearby who shares them.

Joel Dyer blogs the sale of a four-unit apartment complex in the Tower District for $750,000:

We gaped at the asking price, but we never once thought it was not going to be met. We knew someone would jump at the bait. Probably a Bay area person. My landlord, also, informed us that the current owner was planning on calling the units "3 bedroom". That's when I began to gag. My studio apartment on Vassar Ave was as big. Granted, these units were very likely better made and laid out, but it didn't dismiss the fact that they were all about 700-800 square feet at best. And the owner was planning asking for over $1000 in rent. Well, the 'for sale' sign went up last Saturday. The realty agent came out, took a mess of pictures of the exterior, interior, shots of the views and houses across the streets (though I think she skipped my place because of the delapidated fence situation) and left. So, that was Saturday. Saturday was the first official day of saleability. Today is Tuesday. Today there is a 'sold' sign on the realty sign. That's 4 days at most. The place sold in four days. Four freaking days. It ain't even renting yet. Four days.

And the home prices continue to climb. Also agape at the costly real estate are Fresno Craigslisters.

One day last week, a group of sixth graders shuffled into their seats in Baird Middle School classroom number three. They'd been dreading and expecting this day all year, since the first rumors had filtered down from their seventh- and eighth-grade schoolmates, since the letter went home to their parents requesting permission for the kids to sit in this classroom on this day. Their teacher Jim Campbell stood at the front of the room as he always did, but today he wasn't talking about earthquakes or math inequalities. Sitting on Mr. Campbell's desk was a weighty, colorful tome bearing the words "Sex Can Wait."

Steven Johnson continues to garner enthusiastic praise for his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Pop Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. In the book, he argues that mass-market entertainment today, like "Grand Theft Auto" and "The Sopranos," is training us to think in much more complicated ways than the best entertainment of yesteryear, like "Hill Street Blues" and "Pac Man." You can agree or disagree with Johnson's thesis. But one point is beyond argument:

Nothing about UPN's "Britney and Kevin: Chaotic" can possibly be good for you.

As Mike Oz noted in last week's column, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (a.k.a. E3) is this week. And this year, the Big Three video game console makers -- Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo -- are all unveiling their next-generation machines, the consoles that'll replace the Playstation 2, the Xbox and the Gamecube. Check out the previews of the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and (coming tomorrow) the Nintendo Revolution.

Oh, and if you've got a high-speed Internet connection and a hundred or so megabytes of disk space, go watch this bootlegged preview of the Playstation 3 in action. Your jaw will drop. (If you know what "real-time rendering" means, well, prepare to encounter a whole new definition of the term.)

Between giving drug-testing kits to parents and cracking down on Senior Ditch Day, Fresno adults are totally harshing the collective buzz of our wayward adolescents. Note that this may be a good thing, given that the kids have started mugging the ice-cream truck.

Starbucks frontiersmen, Visalia's crumbling chamber of commerce, and teen heartthrob philosophy all make an appearance in this week's quotes.

Update: The Editor has produced a nicer feed. Links below are changed accordingly.

Fresno Famous now has an RSS feed of the Famous events calendar. (What's RSS?) Just point your RSS reader to this link, and let the event-y goodness flow.

By the way, check this out. This page was used to make the Famous RSS events calendar feed. If you know HTML at all, and don't mind digging around in the source, the page is a fantastic way to create RSS feeds for any Web page. More on that June 1.

The Downtown Association's long-awaited Fulton Plaza Thursdays kick off tonight, with farmer's markets, bands, booths and beer, as gleefully noted by Famous. Fresno's Leading Young Professionals will be holding their regular happy hour on the Fulton Mall as well.

The Bee recently reported that the Fresno Motor Sports Development Partnership (what, folks, no Web site?) aims to bring an 80,000-seat racing complex to Fresno -- a replacement for the Kearney Bowl and the Clovis Speedway of yesteryear. Although the City Council doesn't seem to be biting, proponents of the complex say they'll go forward with their plans. Some of the backers of the effort, like Dave Swindell, have had this twinkle in their eyes for at least a couple years now.

You may have heard a lot about RSS feeds. Please believe me when I say they will make your life wonderful. Now FresnoBee.com's got RSS feeds, and this tutorial will show you how to use them.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article introducing what I call the "Custom Web," showing you ways to tweak your Web-surfing experience to suit your tastes. RSS takes the concept of the Custom Web to the next level.

OK, maybe not exactly in Peoria, but in Stelle, Illinois, population 110, Wired magazine tells us that perfectly mainstream nuclear families are putting solar panels on their roofs.

Last week, students from the new Urban Entrepreneurship class at Fresno State presented some ideas on how to reshape downtown. We asked the students to send along some of the presentations. Nader Assemi responded with a set of slides and video clips outlining his idea: turning the warehouse space along Broadway into a mix of commercial and residential housing, including a four-story plaza structure. Download the entire presentation by right-clicking and saving this link (Warning: 30-megabyte ZIP file). Or just click here and here to see PDFs of Assemi's drawings depicting the proposed space. (PDFs are around 700 kilobytes each. But they're certainly worth a look.)

We'll post any other presentations as they come in.

OK, this is getting ridiculous. A month after Fresno showed up in Men's Health as one of the nation's happiest cities, five months after Men's Health named us one of the nation's 25 fittest cities, now the magazine is saying we eat badly. These lists seem ever more contradictory.

Catch Lynndie England, human magnets, the essentials of honky-tonk and more in this week's quotes.

Clarification: The Jimmy Eat World show hasn't yet passed through Fresno. Before, this post made it sound as though the band had come and gone.

All those who won't be catching Jimmy Eat World on their upcoming foray through Fresno, here's your chance. Mike Osegueda just passed on the word that Green Day has drafted Jimmy Eat World for the band's fall tour. They'll be hitting the Save Mart Center on October 1. Mike says there'll be an article in Sunday's paper about JEW's show next Wednesday.

Did anyone else know John Hughes was planning a Pretty in Pink sequel, in which Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy and John Cryer have all agreed to star?

At a press conference yesterday, Creative Fresno announced the results of its survey of local residents (PDF). E.J. Schultz writes up the results in today's Business section, noting that "more than half of college graduates who moved here in the past five years plan to leave by the end of 2010." Other tidbits from the survey reveal that the Fresnorati are all about houses, not so much a fan of high-rise apartments; and we're big fans of NorCal, but not hot on SoCal.

Even though this survey shows that Fresno's got some challenges in keeping these young professionals in the city, the responses sound more optimistic than those given for an unscientific survey conducted by The Bee in 1998. Then, 438 respondents sent buckets-full of mostly negative answers in answer to dozens of questions about the city's image.

Has Fresno's sense of itself improved in the last seven years? Is it still getting better?

Update: Thoughts from The Bee's editorial board.

Over two hundred years ago, the bicycle was invented. On the first weekend in May, teams of mechanical engineering students from all over the country came to California State University, Fresno, to see if they could build a better bike. Follow the Fresno State team members as they race their single-rider vehicle in this video story.

Note: The beginning of this post originally said, "Over two years ago," which, though technically accurate, wasn't what I meant to write at all. It was changed to "over two hundred years ago" after commenter ScottM pointed it out.