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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 Last night, Wednesday, August 19th at 6 PM (well, I got there ay 6:38 PM) Paul Grabowicz, the Associate Dean and New Media Program Director at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, hosted the second meetup of local bloggers in the school's library. It was a great event. The idea of these meetings is, as the email put it, ... "so people can get together to socialize, share ideas, solve common problems and explore ways we might collaborate. We also want to find out what kind of training people might be interested in through the UC Berkeley J-School's Knight Digital Media Center" And really that's what happened. The meeting itself, which I did not video as some people don't want to be on camera, started with the idea of breaking into groups around "editorial" concerns and "business" issues, but that was jettison

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! | Visit YouTube | Visit UShow.com On YouTube.com LakeFest is a street fair that was held last Saturday and Sunday August 1st and 2nd on Lakeshore Avenue between Lake Park and Mandana near the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. After a long absence, it's back for its second year and with great bands and vendors selling clothes and representing everything from the new Lake Chalet restaurant to "Friends of the Oakland Public Library." I talked with a number of Oaklanders about the festival because there was a long period of time that, well, there was not an event of this kind at this location. That is until Helen Wyman stepped in. Helen Wyman is an event producer currently best known for the first, successful Uptown street fair held June 18th of this year. She explained that this event has nothing to do with the version of year's past and is brand new. "'LakeFest' was a concept we

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! | Visit YouTube | Visit UShow.com Oakland has a new set of taxes I think are much needed and should not be a massive burden on the citizens already hurt by job losses and the credit crunch. In a very cool mail-order voting style, which really gets those people who care about the issue to actually vote for it with a chance of passing, Oakland Measures C,D,F, and H all passed, a dramatic reversal over the revenue-increase killing outcome of many of the November choices, reflecting the then-worsening economy. Now, Oakland can and will tax the gross receipts of all "cannabis businesses" with a tax of about 1.8 percent which will raise over $200,000, on top of a new 14 percent hotel occupancy tax (high, yes) for the Chabot Space and Science Center and the Oakland Museum and the convention center; meanwhile Measure 00 was reduced, which I'm not cool about but it helped solve the deficit problem, and pr

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! YouTube , Yahoo , MySpace , Metacafe , DailyMotion , Blip.tv , StupidVideos , Sclipo and Viddler Michael Jackson's passing is still a shock to me. The very idea that someone I feel like I grew up with left us at the age of 50 is just not right at all. I first saw Michael perform when I was 10 years old at the old Chicago International Amphitheatre in 1972; the Campbell family, who babysat me, took me and I remember it like it was yesterday. The Jackson Five was then the must see event and Michael was the star. Michael was like my brother. In a way for many African Americans he was just that, a sibling. I knew him as the guy who grew up in Gary, Indiana. We knew people who knew them in Chicago, so I felt close to him long ago. I think it's for that reason so many African Americans were on Michael's side during the years when it seems he was kind of flying the coup: changing his skin color fro

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! ' On YouTube.com So a few days ago I wrote a blog post with a vlog about the Iran Elections or given what's going on over there the "Iran Revolution" and in preparing for it ran across an article who's take on Twitter , the main event in the Iran uprising, I disagreed with. It was written by Kara Swisher, the semi-well-known Wall Street Journal vlogger who covers "All Things D" or "Digital" as her blog site's called. I wrote: The amount of information communicated through Twitter has been of staggering proportions. While Kara Swisher may write that it's "inane and half-baked", the fact that Iranians can use their cell phones to tweet information and share photos has done more than the mainstream media in telling the World what's happening. Well that sent her into a tizzy. She got on Twitter and publicly blasted me, writing things like:

I attended the Sunday Community meeting held at Rooz Cafe on Park Avenue by the "I Love The Parkway Theater" group of concerned citizens and by all accounts it was successful. Even Oakland Councilmember and mayoral candidate Jean Quan, who's in District One, not District Two, which is Pat Kernighan's and where the Parkway Theater is located, was there and talking (she didn't mention she was running for mayor to her credit). But there's a little weirdness going on I've got to address. I'm editing the video from the event so I'm not going to spill the beans on the event here in its entirety, but I'm taking time this night - as movie mogul Peter Gurber in a conversation with Cameron Diaz on his cool talk-show "Storymakers" with Variety's Peter Bart says "privacy is gone" to her regarding the Internet and celebrity - to write that there are no secrets in community issues, so why do some people act like there are in the