North Beach with Rich Reilly

E-mailed Rich Reilly and we decided to hit the town, so at 5pm I biked home and hopped in the car and zoomed into The City, except it was quite a dawdly zoom--bumper to bumper traffic on 280 all the way-- and I didn't get to the offices of Red Herring until 730.

Somebody was leaving the locked building just as I was trying to enter, and then inside the guard phoned Richard to make sure I was a legitimate guest. Then I pounded on the door of the office until somebody opened it for me. Luckily they work late at Red Herring.

Richard was bubbling over with enthusiasm for his job. His article about Boxlot.com has generated a lot of notice; CNN called him and wanted to do an interview, but Rich consulted with his editors and decided not to do it. Not yet. He's getting all kinds of job offers, but he's going stay at Red Herring and learn the trade.

We went to a bar next door to Tosca in North Beach and had a few drinks. He told me about witnessing a street beating--five Mexicans with golf clubs beat the shit out of some homeless woman. They hopped into a car and drove off, and when the cops arrived Richard gave them a detailed description of their car and that car was swiftly tracked down and the cops took Rich to the arrest site and he identified the passengers as the perpetrators of the beating. He told me about driving through the mountains in Bosnia and skidding off the road in the snow and almost going over a cliff, and some Brits in a tank came along and towed them out.

Then Steve and his sister Racheal arrived. Steve is a technology writer at Red Herring. Racheal was a real looker, visiting her brother here after graduating from UCLA last month with a degree in sociology.

From there we walked along Broadway looking for another bar to go to, someplace with food, and the dancers from the strip clubs were at the front doors trying to lure guys in. Haven't seen that very often.

We went to Pearl's, also next door to Tosca, because it wasn't crowded and wasn't noisy, but that turned out to be because Pearl had an excellent jazz band, piano, standup bass, drums, and an Ella Fitzgerald-style singer, and Pearl didn't like customers to make a lot of noise. She kept chastising Rich to keep it quiet, and her co-owner, a good-looking black guy around 65, gave Rich a severe lecture. They wouldn't serve us food. Oh well.

Then we drove to another part of the City to a bar with a heavy chick DJ and continued to get drunk on our butts. Was it called Skylark? I got home around 130am.