We had an agenda when we got up today:  see the chocolate exhibit at the Academy of Sciences.  This Saturday a special demonstration on mole tamales was advertised at the museum at its temporary housing on Howard Street. Fun time... but only an okay special event in a museum that is offering only a few things to show in its temporary headquarters.  The mole excitement was confined to a couple of folding tables off the chocolate hall on the main floor.  Two volunteers talked about the peppers, chocolate, and other ingredients that go into a good mole sauce. Every 10 minutes or [...]

Our favorite den of iniquity, Daddy's Bar at 440 Castro, has started an email newsletter. The enticement for handing over your email address is the lure of periodic cocktail coupons to print out. I've signed up -- and I hear the first mailing will be tomorrow and include a post Dore Alley beverage offer. You can sign up directly or else go to their Castro bar website (Flash required) and click on the link there.

To get off the streets, people need jobs and housing.  Imagine trying to land a job when your prospective employer cannot call you back or find a place to live when your new landlord cannot phone you with either a question or the go ahead. When you’re homeless you’re also phone-less.  That makes it terribly hard to break the cycle. A non-profit organization has a solution.  Community voice mail distributes free voice mail services to people with financial need. Their simple idea works.  In 2004, despite a difficult national economy, 55% of their clients found jobs and 65% found housing…. [...]

The California Attorney General announced today that paperwork has been filed to initiate the campaign to eliminate existing Domestic Partnerships and outlaw Marriage Equality. Equality California has information on the initiative. The California State's Attorney General's official title and description for the petitions is online in pdf format. Barricades, anyone? 

Bill Frist (R-TN) spoke at noon today at the Commonwealth Club. He chose to talk about problems in delivering health care.  The Club format limits the speech and question/answer sections together to an hour.  Good thing, as this right-wing Presidential wanna be was a yawner.  An hour was more than enough. […]

This weekend's three-day retreat at Asilomar left me talked out.  Good people, important topics, interesting things to think about.  Yet, three days of being careful, intentional, moderate, deliberate, and speaking only for myself is exhausting. Being around the same 9 people for three days is hard on my only-child sensibilities, too. Fortunately Geoff, fuzzygruf, and David were at Harvey's yesterday evening.  I appreciated the opportunity to speak, bitch, snort, and scratch without monitoring for process violations. Asilomar must have been spectacular when it was built in the early 1900's. The Monterrey dunes and shore are perfectly windswept and made magical by blowing fog.  [...]

Today's fun piece of green cheese is at http://moon.google.com .  Be sure to zoom in all the way!

Summer? In San Francisco? Oh Noooooo! However improbable a warm July day is, we've got one! It's 74.3 degrees at 3 pm with full sun and a light wind. (Yes, we record the weather readings from the back yard.) We were going to go to Harvey's and watch the men watch other men out on Castro Street.  Instead, the BBQ is calling out.  Time for Tower Market Mollie Stone chicken sausages. 

One of the new gay/lesbian/etc. cable networks, LOGO, is reviewed in Slate today.  Their critic's verdict is that LOGO is too bland and stuffed with g-rated stories. "So far, the network's slate seems to consist largely of earnest gay-themed movies like The Brandon Teena Story (a documentary about the real-life murder case on which Boys Don't Cry was based), Heavenly Creatures, and The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, in which Glenn Close plays a lesbian colonel who sued the military after being discharged for her sexual orientation," writes Dana Stevens. "Earnest"? I use TV as mental Sani-flush.  A steady diet of those movies [...]

Today the answer from the Administration (and their hard-right flakguard) is that we're in Iraq to fight terrorism.  Some professor of apology from the Hoover Institute was featured today on KCBS' In Depth.  He nailed the current muddle by saying that it doesn't matter why we initially got into Iraq. We're there now and  have to stay and "win" because we're fighting terrorism. Or not.  It strikes me that it's more likely that we're stupidly hardening a generation of American-hating terrorists (or, "freedom fighters", if they eventually force the United States to leave Saigon-style and write this chapter of history). More [...]