Katy St. Clair of the SF Weekly won first prize in the humor category for large papers at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ column-writing contest for 2009. First-place awards pay $300. The contest’s judge wrote:

Only St. Clair would use a trip to a bar called “Casanova” as an excuse to quote from Aesop, or work references to Fred Flintstone and the 1936 Olympic games into the same column. Her humor often coses with a history lesson, literary notation, a reference to her mother, and a chaser of pathos, as she sagely encounters an array of sloshing drunks, leering barkeeps, Glengarry Glen Ross-quoting salesmen and predators and prey of various spots and stripes.

Here’s a sample of St. Clair’s work (link).