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These pearl/tapioca/boba/bubble/milk tea drink places seem to be popping up all over Fremont. There was Quickly, now there’s Chess & Tea. This particular milk tea shop is unique in that it also provides an environment conducive to the game of chess. Each of their tables has a chess board imprint. One section of the store is devoted to assorted chess products for sale.

Although its teas are steeped in the Asian tea tradition, the shop takes an Asian fusion approach to some drinks by offering concoctions mixed with Italian soda. They also serve crepes and gelato ice cream. The back of the store has a little lounge area complete with a wide-screen plasma tv. The front-end has two computer stations for free internet surfing. Chess & Tea would be the perfect place for me to hang out if they set it up as a free wi-fi hotspot as well.

The past week or so some quiet changes have been going on in my immediate blogosphere. Let’s see: Ganns’s SuperBlessed.net is finally live…Raffy gets MT going with his new blog…Ariel Atienza jumpstarts another Blogspot site…Keren drops Digital Siopao for KerenTan.com…Mizwacky transforms into IreneQ…Noelle features herself in her new layout…B. Vergara gets married in the Philippines…Erna left for the P.I. to attend the Sangandaan Conference among other things…The Wily Filipino is apparently attending the same conference…Click Mo Mukha Mo is making its mark on the web again…Paulo is back better than ever…Willie is on hiatus…and Rick’s camera shares the same fate as mine and jeopardizes his photo blog…

Here is our Fourth of July weekend in pictures. No, you will not see spectacular shots of fireworks displays because, frankly, my wife and I didn’t plan our Fourth of July that well this year. Hopefully, we more than made up for it by attending all these other events around the Bay Area.

Saturday morning was spent at the Farmer’s Market in Union City. We took a little break at Paddy’s Coffee House which I discovered was serving up free wi-fi access to the public (joy!):

Later that day, we headed out to San Francisco to go to the Fillmore Street Jazz Festival. Having lived in balmy East Bay for several years has made me forget about the cold summer days and the terrible parking in San Francisco. I came unprepared with only a light shirt on and I ended up parking three blocks away up a steep hill.

The next day, after church, we went back to San Francisco to watch the free outdoor performance of the San Francisco Symphony at the Stern Grove Festival. We came prepared this time with our long sleeve shirts and light jackets. The conductor, acknowledging the chilly weather, spiced up his set with the symphony’s rendition of the Can-Can. Several audience members did high-kicks to warm up.

On Monday, we attended a wedding. Yes, on a Monday. It was a beautiful outdoor wedding held at the Brazilian Room in Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley.

My goodness, my blog is turning out to be a photolog, isn’t it? Well, I’ve acquired an itchy trigger finger ever since I got my digital camera. I just hope my blog page doesn’t load slowly because of the pics. Please guys, let me know when it does. I’ll move the pictures somewhere else in the site if necessary. Well, I may not be taking too many pictures for long anyway. Because of my carelessness, the LCD screen of my camera cracked when I flung my backback across the van floor. I can only take pictures through the viewfinder now, which is okay I guess.

Over the years in Hollywood, competing studios have managed to release movies dealing with the same subject matter simultaneously. For example, in 1985 we saw Weird Science, Real Genius and My Science Project - movies about teenage nerd scientists - come out around the same time. Then when The Abyss was shown in theaters, The Leviathan was released shortly afterwards. Another example is the Bug’s Life/Antz fuss where Pixar CEO Steve Jobs, no stranger to being copied, accused former Disney executive Katzenberg of stealing his idea and bringing it to his new studio.

Well, Steve Jobs may be learning a thing or two from idea nabbers with his very own The Incredibles set to be released in late 2004. The movie’s trailer, which was first shown on opening day of Finding Nemo, hilariously depicts a retired superhero desperately trying to get his belt around his now portly belly. To me this was something I vaguely remember seeing before. Captain Sturdy, a cartoon revolving around an aging superhero and his obese sidekick, has been airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim for quite some time now. In addition, Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi’s The Ripping Friends, another cartoon about wacky superheroes, is drawn in a similar fashion (big torsos, tiny legs) and has been out for a couple years now.

Oh well, this may well all be a coincidence. I could chalk it up to some sort of “collective consciousness” that produces similar ideas for several people at a given time, but somehow I also have this nagging feeling that some people will always copy others (whether from inspiration or for outright lack of originality) and manage to be dangerously close to being slapped with a copyright lawsuit.

Update: How could I forget? The cartoon Spongebob Squarepants also features aging superheroes: Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy. Mermaid Man is a pink-slippered Aquaman look-alike. Barnacle Boy is his cranky sidekick in a sailor outfit.

I worked next door to Cyberdyne Systems and didn’t even know it. I always knew the building that was blown up in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was somewhere in Fremont, CA but didn’t know exactly where. It turns out that during all the years I worked at ePhones on Bayside Parkway, I was working next to the building that was featured in the movie. I only realized this when I watched T2 once again on DVD recently. I visited the site today and took some pictures.

Here’s the front of the building:

Here’s a still from the movie clearly showing the three-tiered portico of the building:

This is me and one of my sons in front of the old ePhones building (now empty) next door. The ePhones building shares the same form factor as the Cyberdyne Systems building. You’ll see that the door is similar to the one that Ahhnold comes out of.

I’ll blog some other time about another movie star who shot many movies in Fremont. *grin*