All my trials, Lord, soon be over: Joan Baez – a Bay Area treasure – was honored by a thousand people at the Fairmont last month as she received an award from Amnesty International for all her years fighting for human rights. Joan was kind to me once, too. When I played music on KQED-FM with Sedge Thomson all those years ago, Joan one day graciously lent me her band. “It’s all right,” she smiled, “the band is already paid for.” ... Phil Ryan, the famed civil rights attorney, recalls Owsley “the Bear” Stanley, purveyor of LSD to famous acidheads like Jimi Hendrix and The Grateful Dead. Stanley died at age 76 in a car crash in Australia on March 13. Phil writes on Facebook: “I represented Owsley in the U.S. Supreme Court, and later successfully in the California Court of Appeals after he had dosed his landlord with LSD. The landlord freaked out and called the police. They found ‘the Bear’s’ personal stash as well as the stashes of the Grateful Dead’s sound engineers! Don’t ask me how we beat the rap, but we did.” ... Here’s a sobering thought: How would you like to be on trial for your life and all the jurors vote your fate on Yelp? ...

 There was a lot of nostalgia surrounding what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday. “Ah, memories of Ronnie still bring tear gas to my eyes,” cracked Bernie Kapok. In later years, Reagan reportedly walked around his house in Bel Air, demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, put that wall back up again!” I suppose the Gipper wasn’t the only one to get sentimental about the Cold War. Things seemed simpler then – it was them or us. Now it’s them and everybody else. “I don’t care whatever Sarah Palin does these days, she still makes my ovaries hurt,” says Sharon Anderson. Sharon’s also worried about the abuse our language takes on the airwaves: “Since when did ‘impact’ become a verb? Marcel Proust must be spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken.” Poulet roti to the great Frenchman of letters. Or is that French letters? If anyone is old enough to remember Queen Victoria, they might know what “French letters” mean. Well, don’t look at me.

Norm Goldblatt, the funnyman and physicist, reports that “today I received three promises of enhancement, four cures for ED, and, curiously, from Google Chrome, a browser extension.” Sounds like personal growth to me. Norm did a standup gig for a Mensa gathering. Things go better when you can’t understand the hecklers. … Michael Rawls, the sage of Nob Hill, sauntered past a notoriously squalid residential hotel on California Street: “There’s a real bedbug-and-breakfast place.” …

The Mideast turmoil brought us lots of exotic names of places in the news: Sa’naa, Benghazi, Manama, Tabriz: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” So muttered the bitter Ambrose Bierce, the original Old Gringo. … A TV station described a 65-year-old homicide victim on Lower Nob Hill as “elderly.” Say, is 65 really elderly? I thought 65 was well, the new 59. … My old friend Charlie Mandel called from Florida. He’s 76 or so. He sounded lugubrious. “All the things I once thought important aren’t really important at all,” Charlie muses. “Like a good joke once in a while, or seeing someone run for president who really cares about the country, or having a few friends.” 

Charlie paraphrases J.P. McEvoy: “A friend is not a feller who is taken in by sham. A friend is one who knows our faults yet doesn’t give a f–!” I’m not old enough to write that word. …

This perplexes me, too: If there are venture capitalists, why do I never hear about venture socialists? ... On that point, I’ve heard of “spiraling downward” – but what about “spiraling upward”? I guess that doesn’t happen too often these days. …

Let’s look on the bright side (if we must). My brother Jack plans to take me to a Giants game. “This should be interesting,” he tells his friends. “The only thing my brother hates more than baseball is sunshine.” Aw, does he really mean that? I saw Scott Beach, the S.F saloon raconteur on TV the other day in The Right Stuff, which was directed by North Beach’s Phil Kaufman. Scott played Werner von Braun. He told me about one scene where von Braun shouts at President Eisenhower: “It was very unsettling,” Scott said. “The guy looked so much like Ike. I was appalled that I had to be so nasty to him.”

The BBC’s Justin Webb on San Francisco: “There are so many European tourists here: poor things, they have traveled ten hours to come to the only part of America that isn’t American. They’ll go home knowing nothing.” Well, don’t look at me. …

Bruce Bellingham also writes for the Marina Times. Tell him something at bruce@northsidesf.com.