Well, I hope that all of you dear readers are all still loving hearing me spout about Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin, cause I have more news!

Here in San Francisco, Armistead will be honored at the Opening Night of LitQuake '07, which is an annual literary festival here in our highly literary city.  He will be awarded the festival's first Barbary Coast Award for lifetime achievement!

Notable Bay Area residents/Armistead- related famous people Laura Linney, Michelle Tea, Jon Ginoli of Amoeba and Pansy Division fame AND Judd Winick, among others, will be speaking.  At last, the mystery of spotting Armistead and Judd of the Real World San Francisco eating together recently at Zazie is solved!  I feel better now.  According to Judd's Wikipedia entry, Armistead even spoke at Judd & fellow Real Worlder  Pam's wedding!  Who knew?

Last week I received an email which, on the surface, looked like a real sweet deal -- a request for me to do what looked like a well paying DJ gig at which I could play whatever I wanted and get tons of extra expenses covered. It was from a guy who was organizing an upcoming birthday party for his wife. It sure seemed like the ideal party to DJ -- good money, spin whatever music you feel like, plus have free travel expenses for me and my crew for this four hour gig,

It seemed too good to be true. Which, of course, it was. The email I received was similar, almost identical right down to every misspelled word, to one making the rounds right now through many US DJs' (club/radio/mobile) and musicians' email in-boxes over the last couple of months. In fact, you readers may have even received a copy yourself already if you are a musician or DJ. In Colorado recently the Denver Musician Association posted a warning on its website alerting its members "The following (or similar) email messages have been received by several members of Local 20-623 - Denver, Colorado. DO NOT RESPOND to this email should you receive it, as it has proven to be an attempt to draw you into a fraudulent business transaction."  The email that the musicians in Denver had received was almost identical to mine (scroll down to see all versions) with the exception of the party date and location. 

This new email scam is just the latest spin on the stereotypical email scam whereby some wealthy banker or prince in Africa emails you out of the blue with an opportunity to make an easy million dollars. All you have to do is open a bank account and forward him a mere $1000 -- or something along those lines. The basis for any successful con is to win over the mark's CONfidence and then trick them into fronting the con artist a little up front in advance of the million dollars or whatever bait is being offered.

Trans World Entertainment #0688

Fillmore San Francisco hip-hop crew Bored Stiff, who came on the Bay Area scene in the early nineties but who had been out of action for some years, return with this new video with lots of shots of SF and a song that addresses the issue of media. What has always made this Frisco crew unique is that they always blurred the line between so-called "rap" and "hip-hop" -- meaning that they are street/gangsta but simultaneously distinctly hip-hop in that they love all the elements, such as graffiti -- just the way it should be. Look for Bored Stiff's releases, including their new one From The Ground Up, as well albums by individual members (inc. Equipto) at Amoeba Music. 

Meantime, below check out Fillmore, SF rappers -- JT the Bigga Figga and Rappin 4-Tay along with Master P, Dangerous Dame, Ray Luv, Lil Ric, King George and the rest of the West Coast Bad Boyz mob, in a video shot in Richmond, CA for the posse single "Peace 2 Da Streets" from the compilation album West Coast Bad Boyz: Anotha Level of the Game (No Limit 1994).

After receiving about four emails and two phone calls since Tuesday asking me "Did you hear? Did you hear that Ian MacKaye was killed?" I decided I should post an Amoeblog to set the record straight in case anyone else out there was still under the wrong impression that the Minor Threat/Fugazi/Dischord mainman was indeed killed in a car crash Monday night. The rumor appeared on several websites including MySpace and Wikipedia. He wasn't killed, as outlined in the reprinted story from the Baltimore Sun that appeared online Weds morning under the heading Ian MacKaye: I'm not dead. And if you scroll down below I have posted one of the erroneous "news" reports that was making the rounds online. It is written in such a news-like fashion that you can see why someone reading it would tend to take it at face value.

This is another prime example of just how quickly misinformation can get around in this cyber/digital age and how it is important to always question what you read and to be aware of its news or fact checking source -- if there is any.

STORY BELOW IS REPRINTED FROM BALTIMORE SUN

A phone rings at 6:08 p.m. in Arlington, Va. A 45-year-old man picks up. The
caller doesn't even have the chance to offer a greeting.

"I am still alive," reports Ian MacKaye, the frontman of such punk acts as
Minor Threat and Fugazi, and the founder of Washington's Dischord Records.

This would not be news except that The Sun and apparently many other
organizations had been told that MacKaye was, in fact, dead. We were told that
he died Monday night at Baltimore's St. Agnes Hospital. A call to the hospital
found no evidence of such a patient. We followed up with calls to Dischord
(left a message) and to MacKaye's home.