Luxuriating in beats

My wishlist now has one less CD on it, thanks to the enticing and enterprising Sekretnaut. Eschewing amazon.com except as a research tool, she copied a friend's disk and presented me with pirate booty. Now I'm raising a mug of blog to her, aaarrrr!

I once scored three months' worth of free NYT Book Reviews. Standing around in a local independent bookstore, I overheard another customer saying to the woman behind the counter that she had seen a book on amazon.com and wanted to see if they had it. I remarked that I used amazon.com only for window shopping, as it were, and tried to buy all my books at that store. The delighted clerk -- who turned out to be the owner -- presented me with my intended purchase, the NYT Book Review, gratis. When I recounted this incident to a columnist at the Chronicle, she printed it, with the name of the store. In return for this free publicity, the owner gave me free Book Reviews all summer long.

Elsewhere in San Francisco, twenty clowns took a ride on BART, making a baby cry. Others were more sanguine:

Passengers seemed amused, puzzled, overjoyed or bored by the display. Somewhere below Market Street, Ellie Kim, a student at the Boalt Hall School of Law, was trying to read a legal text while several clowns juggled around her. "I think this is the First Amendment in action,'' Kim said, looking up from her book at last. "But I'm just a first-year student, so I could be wrong. ''