A whole list of suitably ironic hipster bars was concocted for this series and I fully intended to stick with it, at least until I found myself at the Clift Hotel with out-of-town guests on Monday night. People, drinking in the Redwood Room is like attending Hogwarts without the treacle pudding and magical ability. Fairly innocuous while displaying Klimt's greatest hits, the digital frames lining the redwood walls eventually switched to unsettling Harry Potter-esque portraits of people who move when really they should be sitting still. Rather than blinking and breathing and staring down their patrician noses as you gulp your second strawberry margarita.

The gay boys from New York kept glancing warily over their shoulders and one muttered, "Make him stop staring at me." I'm sure there are more sinister things on this earthly plane - Stephen King movies, the graves of freshly baked zombies, Martha Stewart's to-do list - but none of them reside on the corner of Geary and Jones. So the Redwood Room and its digital frames definitely take the Creepy Cake.

But the enormous, fur-swaddled chair in the lobby is flat-out awesome (think Alice in Wonderland goes on safari), especially when you and your tipsy compatriots use it as a pommel horse for pictures.