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Maria Muldaur I had the wonderful pleasure of befriending legendary singer Maria Muldaur last year during the 2008 presidential primary and through a mutual friend and Obama supporter, Brent Turner and Joel Jaffe of Studio D in Sausalito, CA.  For those of you who have not heard of Maria, you may have heard of the classic song Midnight at The Oasis , it was she who wrote and sang it in 1973, around the time Lars, Bill, and I were kids using BART to get around . Last year the Marin County dweller created this cool song, a tribute to then-Senator Barack Obama called "Yes We Can" ; I created this video around it for her: After Obama's presidential win, Maria, now in her 70s but looks to be in her 40s, continued to perform concerts at local venues around the Bay Area. Today, she sent an email annoucing that she's returning to her "Jug Band" roots in her new CD and fall concert tour called "Maria Muldaur and her Garden of Joy". Maria explai...

It's agreed that the planned March 2010 closure of the Fremont New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant is a huge economic loss, but the elimination of 4,700 jobs only scratches the surface of the problem. That coupled with the stoppage and possible closure of the Chevron Richmond refinery, which already cost 1,100 jobs and we have a total of 5,700 direct jobs lost and over 29,000 total people thrown out of work or unable to get work in a San Francisco Bay Area that can't afford this economic hit at this time. 23,000? Yeah. 23,000 jobs. See, there's a multiplier impact with business operation such that an office or a manufacturer contracts with other businesses for supplies and services. The action of a small business owner walking down to the local store to buy printer paper is part of the multiplier effect because that small expenditure helps the retailer run his or her business. Or that person's employee - even if it's just the owner - eating lunch ...

Zennie Abraham shows Lanita Pace-Hilton his Flip camera , originally uploaded by allaboutgeorge . This was at the Blogger meetup at the Berkeley J School. Here's the video from that event:

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! | Visit YouTube | Visit UShow.com Ha! This is the beauty of being a local in Oakland and the Bay Area. Having friends who have old photos of you and them in action. In this case the photo below is one of Lars Frykman, Bill Boyd and myself on BART in 1975. (In case you're wondering where Bill is, he's the photog here.) Zennie and Lars - 1975 Bill found this photo and put in on his Facebook profile page; now it's on mine too. But I couldn't resist sharing it as it's a small window into the Bay Area of the past. I mean, I had a small "'fro" and Lars was sporting the Rolling Stones' hair look. But that was as much hair as I wanted; no longer. No big 'Fro for me! The only place I can think of where we may have been going at the time was Berkeley and to the Federation Trading Post (FTP) on a weekend or San Francisco just to ride through the then-new BART tube. That ...

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! | Visit YouTube | Visit UShow.com Nicholas Kristof has a great op-ed piece in today's New York Times where he explains... California spends $216,000 annually on each inmate in the juvenile justice system. In contrast, it spends only $8,000 on each child attending the troubled Oakland public school system, according to the Urban Strategies Council In a pointed critique of our seeming blood lust in spending money on prisons and locking people up over health care and education. While one may quibble with the estimates, there can be no disagreement that California has lost any desire to maintain the vast education system that it was known for. When I was little, California schools were considered the best in the country, and while Oakland had its challenged programs, it had gems like Skyline High School where I graduated. Not any more. The "me generation" brought us Proposition 13 and dramati...

Vlogger Sarah Austin - who looks like a (she's gonna kill me for this) kind of cross between Britney Spears, Chelsea Clinton, and Heidi Montag - invited me to her coming back to San Francisco party Monday evening. (Yes, yesterday!) Now, you may be saying "Who's Sarah Austin" - good question. She's a micro-celebrity tech vlogger who gained her fame from appearing first on Justin.tv and now has a livecasting show on Mogulus. The difference between what I do and what she does is she's not a political commentator and focuses more on tech. To that end, she started her own site Pop17.com and has drawn a range of guests from the tech industry and has Ford Motor Company (she's an "agent" of The Ford Fiesta Movement ), Virgin America, Perkett PR and TechCrunch news blog as sponsors. Sarah is a study in how to make vlogging a business and her party was no exception to her example. Held at the office of ZaudHouse Design Group in Portrero Hil...

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! | Visit YouTube | Visit UShow.com YouTube , Metacafe and DailyMotion Rosemary Port is the blogger (and fashion model student) who for some reason believed it was ok to call fashion model Liskula Cohen a "psychotic, lying, whoring...Skank," under the blog post title, "Skanks of NYC" and from under the cover of a name not her own. On Wednesday August 19th, a U.S. Federal Judge ordered Google to identify the name of the person who we now know as Ms. Port.   Rosemary Port But for some weird reason I can only attribute to a lawyer with a super large ego, Rosemary Port thinks she can win a lawsuit against Google for $15 million . No way. And it's not because she's suing Google; it's because in using her blog to make malicious fun of Cohen, Rosemary Port unknowingly violated a provision of "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act" that wa...