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Movie product tie-ins are common and many new products are aimed at kids. That's why the news of the McDonalds Shrek glass recall is so terrible. But first, thank the Office of Congresswoman Jackie Speier for the discovery of the problem. According to the San Francisco Chronicle via the Associated Press , there were 12 million McDonalds Shrek glasses on the market: all of them must be recalled after a discovery by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The glasses are tainted with Cadmium, a carcinogen that can cause "long term adverse health effects." While that's in the recall notice, along with the news that the discovery came from the Office of Congresswoman Jackie Speier from California, that news is buried way down deep in in the Associated Press article. The article also makes it seem as if the Consumer Product Safety Commission made the discovery. You have to read the entire, long work to see that it was Rep. Jackie Speier's office wh...

Also: city of oakland, cA, sf bay area race relations, san francisco, california, rockridge and race, black white oakland Rockridge, Oakland, CA  Oakland, CA - Fresh from a visit to my doctor's office that didn't go as I would have liked (I was told, really ordered, to lose 20 pounds and gave a large vial of blood with the fear of the unknown report to come), I decided that I needed to relax. Normally, a trip to the gym would be the next stop but that's not relaxing, really. Fitness work is just that: another kind of work. The fantasy of having a glass of whiskey at a Rockridge, Oakland, California restaurant next to Rockridge BART - the owners I've known for a long time - seemed like a fun idea. Not meeting anyone; just totally spur of the moment. So I arrived from Rockridge BART, walked in, and noticed the lower level bar area was totally redesigned. The bar itself was smaller than before and two people took up most of it. The bartender, a nice Lat...

"Outside Lands" the popular festival set for San Francisco's Golden Gate Park August 14th and 15th 2010, just released its schedule today. The 2010 Outside Lands list features former Grateful Dead members Phil Lesh and Bob Weir of Furthur, The Kings of Leon, The Strokes, My Morning Jacket, Phoenix, Social Distortion, Al Green, Gogol Bordello, Nas and Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley, The Levon Helm Band, Cat Power, Empire of The Sun, Wolfmother, Bassnectar, Chromeo, Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros, The Temper Trap, Pretty Lights, Janelle Monae, Amos Lee, The Devil Makes Three, Tokyo Police Club, Beats Antique, Rebith Brass Band, Wild Beasts, and a host of other bands. Here's the presentation video listing them all : Tickets for this popular festival of music, food, and wine go on sale Wednesday. Visit SFOutsideLands.com for more information.

This is The Grove in The Marina in 2007! One of the top-listed posts at SFGate.com is by San Francisco Chronicle Food and Restaurant Critic Michael Bauer, who rightly asks why laptop and cell phone use in restaurants make patrons angry. Before weighing in on that, this blogger's compelled to point out that the photo used in his post was taken in 2007 at at The Grove on Chestnut Street and Avila Avenue in San Francisco's Marina District. The Grove is specifically designed for laptop users. I discovered The Grove for myself in that same year of 2007, while attending a screenwriting class in Fort Mason, nearby. The attraction was that the vast majority of patrons were using their laptops for work. That habit continues today, even as the Grove's recent remodel makes it less favorable to use as a office away from home. That was an awful move, the design change. There are fewer seats for internet work, and more for just lounging. Or it seems this is the case; more...

Nikki Raney has advice for Tila Tila Tequila is a celebrity who's very familiar to readers of this space. The combative reality TV show star, and former wife-to-be of the late Casey Johnson, loves to get in the mix with people.  First it was Perez Hilton and now its Nikki Raney. Nikki Raney is a star blogger and journalist at Zennie62.com .    But before we look more into that and her row with Tila Tequila, some background on Tila Tequila from this space' perspective. In the middle of accusing San Diego Chargers Linebacker Shawne Merriman of assault, when he was just trying to stop her from driving drunk, this space revealed what Tila said about herself : "i like people who are really fucked up...I am very high strung and suffer from multiple personalities...I do a lot of things that are self destructive. I try not to...I am also bi-polar so that should explain my irratic postings." Here's the video on the entire incident between Merriman and Tila Teq...

YouTube , Yahoo , MySpace , Metacafe , DailyMotion , Blip.tv , StupidVideos , Sclipo and Viddler Oakland, CA - Note. This was originally posted on Memorial Day, 2009. It's worth reporting as this blogger prepares to make the same trip in 2010. I went to my stepfather's burial place today. Even though I was really ill, I forced myself to go and place flowers at his grave site as I've made it a habit to visit him on Memorial Day each year. He fought in World War II. But this time, I took my biological father's burial flag with me. Both my father and stepfather died in 2005. To some who are anti-war, the title of this video-blog will upset them. It should not. I'm against war and always have been, but the reality of my life is that both my late father and stepfather fought in World War II, and in my father's case, Zenophon Abraham Sr. I have his name (he lives in Chicago), and I am the proud owner of his neatly folded burial flag and two bulle...

Arrington and Carol Bartz New York, NY - (Zennie62's trip to TechCrunch is sponsored by Christine Smith Associates, Inc. , the Premier Female Contractor in NYC.) Yahoo!'s CEO Carol Bartz is known via Fake Carol Bartz on Twitter for getting off the occasional "F-bomb." But even with that, one doesn't actually expect a person to live up to a Twitter persona created by someone else. Not the case with Carol Bartz; she did. Bartz, who's taken a beating from a very critical Michael Arrington in TechCrunch, walked into what TechCrunch Co-Editor Eric Shoenfeld called "the lion's den" and talked with Michael for 25 minutes. While we have the entire 25 minute interview, this exchange on video was the talk of TechCrunch Disrupt and served to solidify Carol Bartz' combative reputation. To set the stage, Arrington was pressing Bartz on the idea that the best companies are often "single-revenue-source" producers, and was implying...