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Greetings from Georgia, where I'm visiting my Mom. (Humid here.) I ran across a cool website called Beer By BART and it has some rather interesting listings but what's more curious is what was left out of the website. But first, what is it? It's a simple site that you can use to find where to go to get beer near a BART Station. In Oakland's Rockridge District, for example, the site lists just two places: Ben and Nick's and Barclay's and that's it. In reality, there's The Hut just across from Ben and Nick's and closer to BART than Barclay's, as well as Zachary's Pizza which is on the way to Ben and Nick's. So why those two made the cut's a wonder to me. Berkeley BART? Same problem. List just Jupiter and Triple Rock, forgetting "Downtown" which is on the way. What is this, the anti-yuppie beer site? Well, visit the site and give Steve Shapiro & Gail Ann Williams your views. Regardless of the omits, it'...

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! Last weekend's installment of "The Blog Report with Zennie62" features the 16th District Delegate Election that was held in Alameda in January. The show segment, which is shown here, covers the election process and why its important to the political future of the Democratic Party in the Bay Area. But the real stars of the show are Oakland's young political activists who are bringing a new energy to the scene here. East Bay Young Democrats President Frieda Edgette, union leader Dan Rush, and Peralta Community College Trustee Abel Guillen are just some of the faces interviewed in the second Episode of "The Blog Report." Personally, I think Frieda Edgette's the one to watch. The leader of the East Bay Young Dems and " MixitUp East Bay " has a unique combination of energy, intelligence, empathy and direction to rise to the level of congressional representative or senator, and I'm not...

I'm getting a bunch of emails on the happenings in the Oakland Mayor's Office just days after my decision to expell the bad food that was in me: dealing with Oakland's mess of a sports politics situation, of which the Oakland Athletics - not Mayor Dellums - have created. The latest news is David K. Chai, Dellums Chief of Staff is on his way out and possibly but at this point not certain that Dellums' executive assistant Marisol Lopez would take the top spot. One email described the situation like this: his (Dellums') choices for COS (chief of staff) (wonderful at first with Dan Boggan, then unproductive with David Chai, and now completely disorienting with Marisol Lopez his most likely choice) are distancing him from even his own, most loyal supporters. The emails have also allowed me to see why our current Sports and Entertainment Task Force was being undermined by Dellums' dealings to create a new baseball task force: no consistent mayor's staff conta...

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! YouTube , Yahoo , Metacafe , DailyMotion , Blip.tv , StupidVideos , Sclipo and Viddler Today, I saw Star Trek with my longtime friends Bill Boyd and Lars Frykman at matinee showing at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, thus following through on a plan we formed almost a month ago and I wrote about a few days ago. It was a cool reunion as I'd not seen Lars for just over 30 years and Bill and I get together for lunch maybe twice a year. Regardless of how little you see of each other, there's something about the friends you had when you were a teenager, especially when they last as long as ours has. Star Trek was always a rallying point for us, so today's meetup was a perfect way for the originators of the Bret Harte Star Trek Club to reconnect. We're all fans of the original series, and consider ourselves experts on it. What we liked about J.J. Abrams version was the attention to detail in referencing certain...

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! I'm often surprised by the number of people who don't catch on to the fact that for me making videos is much more than a hobby, it's a job I earn a living from. I recently created a video on the Star Trek movie that pointed to its depiction of the San Francisco skyline as unrealistic because of the size of the buildings relative to The City's culture of demanding "a human scale" of structures, and Star Trek's new generation of fanboys coupled with Internet trolls jumped all over me, saying "Get a life" and stop making videos, all the while contributing to the 43,000 times my creation was seen..and to my pocketbook. That's because I'm a YouTube Partner or "YTP". The YouTube Partner's program was established in late 2007 as a way to For YouTube to share its advertising revenue with its most popular video producers like Renetto and Lisa Nova , as well as frequent contri...

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! Today the long awaited Star Trek movie is out and like any nerdy Trekker, I'm excited. I got our tickets 10 days ago and didn't have to stand in line, contrary to what you might think. But the real story here is that on Saturday, May 9th, I'm going to see Star Trek with my long time friends Bill Boyd and Lars Frykman. This is an Oakland Trekker story in brief. Bill, Lars, and I met in Oakland in 1976 when we were 14 years old at what was then called Bret Harte Junior High School, now Bret Harte Middle School. I was new to Oakland, having moved with my mom to the city from Chicago as my mom was in search of better schools for me. How times have changed! The Bret Harte Star Trek Club I was a big Star Trek fan and wanted to start a club at Bret Harte. I had no clue how to do this, so my friends said "You should talk to Bill Boyd or Lars Frykman!" So I was introduced to Bill, who at 14 had the deepest voice ...

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! Folks this is the letter that - coupled with the course of events I described in yesterday's blog post - caused me to write the post explaining why Oakland Athletics Minority Owner Mr. Guy Saperstein is wrong. It's more powerfully worded that what Guy wrote to John Russo and very insulting of the Haas Family, who owned the team long before Lew Wolff's group ever got it. I posted this video response and my blog post is here: BLOG I present it here in the hope that Mr. Saperstein will see his words in a public forum and issue apologies where appropriate, starting with the Haas Family. This is the blog post I wrote, here, and here's a video I posted as a response: April 2, 2009 Senator Barbara Boxer 1700 Montgomery St. Suite 240 San Francisco, CA 94111 Dear Barbara: As you know, Jeanine and I have long supported you and we plan to continue doing so. However, we were very disappointed about the let...