We moved to the S.F. area recently and went exploring in Chinatown. I’d figured it would probably be a tourist trap. Not hardly. Thousands of Chinese live, eat, work, and do business there. The streets are filled with people and it feels to this Anglo like a different planet. Probably because it is.

I like tea. Chinatown, not surprisingly, has lots of tea shops that offer many varieties of tea and have helpful staff  to explain the types of tea. Some of the teas they offer you won’t find anyplace else.

Two fine tea stores I’ve found so far that also have online ordering are Red Blossom Tea Company and Ten Ren Tea.

BTW, it was 97 degrees today in S.F., which is extremely hot for the area. We were in Sacramento today and it was 108. But they’re more used to hot weather. Anything above 80 and people in S.F. start getting hot! Sue and I lived in LA for a considerable period, some of that in the semi-arid San Fernando Valley where it can get scorching, so we don’t even start getting hot until it’s about 100. Rule #1. Drink lots of fluids, tea included.

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AP backed off their threat of a lawsuits against the Drudge Retort (a liberal site) for quoting 40-80 words from their articles. They now say they just want to protect their headlines and the lede from being posted elsewhere. (So does that mean you can quote extensively from the rest of the article without fear of angering grumpy lawyers?)

Several websites with money have promised financial support should this end up in court in a battle over Fair Use. But stakes are high here, a ruling supporting AP could hurt bloggers.

Fair Use doctrine is vague. However too many blogs have the bad habit of quoting large sections of newspaper articles then adding a one sentence response. This is almost certainly not Fair Use and is something I avoid doing here. Besides, why would someone want to read a copy-cat blog with long quotes from elsewhere when they can read the source article instead?

A better alternative is to rephrase what the article said. Then it becomes your post, with your ideas, and Fair Use is no longer an issue.

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Larry Sloman interviewed over 200 people for Steal This Dream, an oral history of Abbie Hoffman. As one who lived through that era and more or less was a Yippie, reading this decades later was illuminating. Mistakes, yeah, we made a few. Drugs nearly destroyed Hoffman and made him into a fugitive. (They almost did me in too.) However, in addition to the recklessness, Hoffman was also a brilliant tactician, deliberately outrageous, and committed to social change.

It’s a fair book. Sloman shows all sides of Hoffman, there’s no attempt at hero worship here. I won’t try to detail it all, except for two stories.

Perhaps the most famous thing Hoffman did was with Jerry Rubin when they tossed money off the NY Stock Exchange balcony, nearly caused a riot among traders grasping for money, and made worldwide headlines. The guards almost didn’t let them it until Hoffman said, while TV cameras were running, you aren’t letting us in because we’re Jewish, aren’t you? This so flustered the guards that they let Hoffman and Rubin in.

Right after the Kent State shootings Jerry Rubin said look they’re killing people, most of us can’t stand up to that and don’t want to either, me included. One person interviewed said Hoffman would have never said that, implying that Rubin was a sell-out, and maybe he was. But, I think, he was also correct. The vast majority of Left politicos have no desire to go underground and live violently. When the change finally does come, it’ll be through a mass aboveground movement, because, really, how else can it happen?

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James Martin spent several years photographing the 48 islands in the San Francisco Bay. The resultant coffee table book has hundreds of photos plus full information and history about each island, as well as information about how to get on them. Amazing stuff.

The Islands of San Francisco Bay website has the book at a special discount.

PS Bird watchers will particularly enjoy the book, as there are many photos of birds.

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